BASEBALL: Indians receive championship monument
Published 2:23 pm Thursday, June 14, 2018
- A monument commemorating PNG’s 5A baseball state championship from 2017 now sits just outside the school’s batting facility and right field. (Courtesy of Steve Morse)
Scott Carter received a Father’s Day gift on what would be his mother’s 77th birthday.
“We pretty much felt like she was with us the whole season,” Carter said. His mother Nelda died Feb. 23, 2017, while his Port Neches-Groves baseball team competed in a tournament at La Porte. That PNG team went on to a 34-8-2 record and the school’s first athletic championship in almost 36 years, winning Class 5A.
On Thursday, a monument arrived at PNG to commemorate that season. It sits just outside the batting facility and right field of PNG’s baseball diamond. Carter planned to show the monument off to PNG fathers Thursday evening.
PNG athletic director and head football coach Brandon Faircloth said the school paid for the monument, which he said was designed by the school’s athletic secretary, Amanda Delcambre. The 5-foot-by-6-foot all-marble monument includes a shape of the state of Texas in black with purple outline sitting on a brick design and includes the jersey numbers and names of each player along with names of coaches, school officials and trainers, and the logo of the UIL Baseball State Championships.
“We wanted to do something the kids would be proud of,” Faircloth said. “Amanda Delcambre designed it, and we got ideas from other schools on how to do the monument. It ends up being something everybody will be proud of.”
— I.C. Murrell
About I.C. Murrell
I.C. Murrell was promoted to editor of The News, effective Oct. 14, 2019. He previously served as sports editor since August 2015 and has won or shared eight first-place awards from state newspaper associations and corporations. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, grew up mostly in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and graduated from the University of Arkansas at Monticello.
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