Robert Starkey finished his career as Shepherd's all-time winningest coach in men's basketball, with 360 wins over his 20-year career. Courtesy photo

SHEPHERDSTOWN — The soot-darkened yellow bricks of Sara Cree Hall didn’t get their color because of the fast break and quick tempo basketball authored by the Shepherd University teams playing inside its heat-tempered confines. It just seemed that way.

Bob Starkey was the coach and presided over the games that often made the winning team score at least 90 points to prevail.

One of Starkey’s best run-run teams was his 1987-1988 version that featured three of his all-time leading scorers dotting the scorebooks with points and, more importantly, wins.

Bobby Chuey, the son of a highly successful high school coach in northern Virginia, would become Shepherd’s sixth all-time career leading scorer with 1,984 points, Terry Connolly, a two-year terror before transferring to NCAA Division I Richmond and guard Bobby Boyd, the school’s eighth-highest career scorer with his 1,912 points, were the front men, as the Rams regularly subdued West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference teams other than Fairmont.

Connolly was the team’s post man. He scored 781 points that season and carried 1,225 points career off to Richmond when he left. Richmond would win the Southern Conference championship in one of Connolly’s two seasons there and also win an NCAA Tournament game.

Boyd totaled 701 points that season and Chuey converted 118-of-134 free throws that season, as the Rams set a school free throw shooting record by converting 671 foul shots.

Carefully kept Shepherd statistics show that on no less than six occasions the trio of Connolly-Chuey-Boyd all scored at least 20 points in a game.

Those six games were against West Liberty, Davis & Elkins, Bluefield, Glenville and twice versus Charleston.

Two of those games especially stand out — the games where Boyd scored 36 points, Connolly had 30 and Chuey another 20 against Charleston and the Glenville game where Chuey notched 34 points, Boyd 32 and Connolly scored 22 points.

Connolly further dotted the school record book with games of 26 points and 20 rebounds against Bluefield; 38 points and 20 rebounds against Buffalo and 28 points and 26 rebounds against West Virginia Tech.

Chuey even recorded a “triple double” with a 19 point, 12 rebound and 10 assist game against Salem.

The 1987-1988 season saw the Rams finish with a record of 21-10. And they even defeated Fairmont twice, with scores of 93-83 in Fairmont and 90-85 in the WVIC tournament played in Charleston.

It was Starkey’s last season at Shepherd, as well as Connolly’s and Boyd’s final seasons. Chuey had one more year to play.

Sara Cree Hall would later fall softly into the background, as the Butcher Center over on the West Campus became the hub of Shepherd basketball until the winter of 2000, when water pipes broke during the Christmas vacation and flooded the court, buckled the floor boards and forced the Rams to play their home games at Shenandoah University, Hedgesville High School, Musselman High School, Martinsburg High School or Jefferson High School for the remainder of the season.

The Butcher Center received a new floor and has been the host for Shepherd home games since 2001.