HERMITAGE, Tenn. — For the former high school star now in their 40s or 50s, the story is often the same. The tales of a state tournament run, the game-winning shot, the bone-crushing hit on a cold December day. For years, those memories lived only in fading yearbook photos and the mind’s eye.
Now, that walk down memory lane is just a click away.
The Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (TSSAA) has unveiled a massive new feature on its website, TSSAAsports.com: a digitized archive of more than 1,100 video tapes from a large VHS collection. For the first time, fans can relive championship moments from a golden era of Tennessee high school sports, with games from 1989 through 2002 currently available and more being added.
The archive is a treasure trove of football, basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, and soccer championship games, capturing the raw emotion and budding greatness of future stars. But the journey to get these moments from dusty shelves to digital screens was a rescue mission in itself, a race against time to preserve a priceless piece of the state’s athletic history.
In 2021, the gentlemen maintaining the archive of the former VideoSports company needed to clear their storage space, putting the future of the collection in jeopardy. Then-Executive Director Bernard Childress knew the tapes couldn’t be lost.
“Mr. Childress thought it was important that we preserve the collection, so we made arrangements to take possession of the tapes,” said TSSAA’s Matthew Gillespie. “Bradley [Lambert] and I drove to Jackson with a U-Haul trailer to pick them up and then eventually began the conversion process.”
VHS Tape Transfers
The task of setting up the conversion process fell to Lambert, who quickly became a video archaeologist of sorts. He began purchasing used VHS players from eBay and established a multi-step workflow to transfer the deteriorating tapes into a modern, searchable format.
After acquiring the needed equipment, Gillespie’s office credenza became the central transfer hub, hosting a half-dozen ordinarily obsolete VHS tape players. The process of transferring is slow, since each game must play back in realtime--box by box, tape by tape.
“We’ve worn out two of the original tape players we purchased,” Gillespie quipped, “but we just keep plugging along. And those stickers that used to be on rental tapes mean more to me now: Be Kind, Rewind."
Today, 1,102 videos are online, but with roughly 400 tapes still to transfer, the library will only continue to grow.
But the story of these tapes begins not in a storage unit, but in the forward-thinking minds of TSSAA leadership in the late 1980s. It was then that then-Executive Director Ronnie Carter, was approached by legendary official Billy Schrivner and Sam Wiley, a video professional from Jackson. Schrivner and Wiley created VideoSports, hatching a plan that was truly ahead of its time.
“When they came to me, I thought we could help people who weren’t going to get to the state tournament. They could still get access—grandparents, whoever—to see their kids playing,” Carter said. “That was so outside the box at the time, but we wanted to get ahead of the game so people had access to our great events.”
For families who couldn’t make the trip to Murfreesboro or Nashville for the state tournaments, a VHS tape was the next best thing.
The digitized collection is a veritable museum of Tennessee sports lore. It’s a world of three classifications, of public and private schools battling on the same field, and of football officiating crews of just four.
You can find the legendary football championship between Red Bank and Riverdale, played in a snowstorm at MTSU. You can watch the breathtaking 1990 triple-overtime girls’ basketball classic between York Institute and Loretto.
“How could you forget that one?” Carter said of the York-Loretto thriller. The archive also captures moments from schools that no longer exist, like Jackson’s Denmark West, Knoxville’s South-Young and Chattanooga’s City High, providing a historical snapshot of a bygone era.
For Gillespie, the project has been deeply personal. An Oakland High School graduate, he found himself digitizing games he attended as a kid, sitting next to his father, who was the public address announcer at many state tournament events.
“Once we got to the early ’90s state basketball games, it kind of changed my perspective,” Gillespie said. “I could hear my dad in the background doing the PA—doing starting lineups–and his voice stood out immediately to me. That’s been really neat.”
The online library is more than just a collection of videos; it’s an interactive experience. A search function allows users to find their school and specific types of games. A search for “OT” will pull up a list of every overtime game in the collection, ready for one-click viewing.
And the collection holds surprises beyond the VideoSports era. A film transfer of the 1938 state championship football game between Elizabethton and Jackson is also available, a remarkable window into a time long past.
“I’m looking forward to seeing that. That’s very, very special,” Carter said. “To think that’s been captured so people can watch it is beyond imagination.”
The VideoSports archive is more than just a library of old games. It’s a gift to every player who ever wore a jersey, every parent who ever cheered from the stands, and every fan who remembers the roar of the crowd. It’s a testament to the vision of those who knew, decades ago, that these moments were worth saving.
“It’s a special piece of history and a compliment to the people involved in getting done what y’all are doing now,” Carter said. “It’s a great gift to people all over the state.”
Visit https://tssaasports.com/history/video/ to browse all the available videos, or go to TSSAAsports.com, click History, then Videos.
Archive Highlights
Girls' Softball · May 25, 2000
Hendersonville vs. Soddy-Daisy
Boys' Basketball · March 22, 1990
Science Hill vs. Christian Brothers
Boys' Basketball · March 14, 1996
Alcoa vs. Nashville MLK
Baseball · May 22, 1998
ECS vs. BGA
Girls' Basketball · March 15, 1990
York Institute vs. Loretto
Football · December 2, 2000
Red Bank vs. Riverdale
VCR Stacks
VHS Transfer Equipment
