There was a time, back when Western Guilford High School, was the country club high school of Guilford County…Maybe just call it the WGCC/Western Guilford Country Club…This is where all of the players wanted to be, at WGCC…
Today, the players look to Dudley, Grimsley, Page, or other schools to be their top spot or destination, but if they were back in the day, those same players from today, they would be choosing and going to Western Guilford High School…It wouldn’t be Dudley, Grimsley, or Page, it would good old Western Guilford High School, as their top stop…
I was standing along the sidelines at the Western Guilford football scrimmage the other night, and was just thinking to myself how much things had changed, from back in the day…The Western Guilford school district included all of the Fleming Road, Collins Grove Community, Old Oak Ridge Road, Inman Road, Pleasant Ridge Road, and certain parts of Highway 68, up near the old Bel Aire Golf Course…
Now all of that old territory is in the Northwest Guilford High School district…
We had some nice affluent neighborhoods out there back in the day, and we had our farming friends right there in the mix too…We had the Western Trail gang, and the Firewood Trail troops…There was even a cement pond over at Dr. Brewer’s place on Western Trail…
And did we have people moving out our way…The first one I remember was when Gil Vance and his family came the Western Guilford way from Grimsley High School…Then somehow they ended up over with Steve Vance, going to Ragsdale HS…But look out, here comes Billy Thomas, our first true kicker, coming our way from Page High School…Then you had Carl Pemberton, coming over from Smith High School…We got Linnett Price, also known as “Turkey”, who moved up here to live with sister in the apartments over on West Market Street, and “Turkey” was not from Turkey, but from a turkey farm down in Monroe, N.C….That Turkey guy was a real good one too, and he later played on the offensive line up at Western Carolina….”Turkey” was a running back/fullback at Western Guilford HS…..
Western Guilford also got guys like David Misroon moving in here from out-of-state(I think they came here from Texas), and when his family came to Greensboro, I think they selected Western Guilford, as their school of choice…Then after Misroon, we got Mike Gillespie who also moved in from out-of-town, and Western Guilford was also his family’s chosen school of higher education…Then there was Jeff Vestal, who came the WG way, from Northeast Guilford High School, and that was a real load of people coming out to the Western Guilford Country Club, or the WGCC, if you will…
I mean back in the 1970’s Western Guilford was “The School of Choice”, in Guilford County…WG was where you wanted to be….If the kids of today were choosing where to go back in the 70’s, they would be lining up to get in over at Western Guilford High School, on Friendway Drive…
While standing on those Western Guilford football sidelines back on Wednesday evening, here in 2022, I realized if I was playing football for Western Guilford today, I would be one of the smallest kids on the team, and I would probably be playing defensive back…Back in the day, when I weighed right at 200 pounds, I was the second largest/biggest kid on the team, and that is sort of crazy to look back at that time now…
There has been a great Transition, and that Transition continues…We can not turn back time, if we could, then Cher would be 23 today, tomorrow, and forever…Time marches on, and the days of the WGCC/Western Guilford Country Club, are LONG GONE!!!!!