Time Machine Tuesday - Pages From An Old South Windsor HS Yearbook

SOUTH WINDSOR, CT — This new periodic feature on South Windsor Patch will run under various titles, including Wayback Wednesday, Throwback Thursday and Flashback Friday, depending naturally on its day of publication. The common theme is that each will contain pages from a South Windsor High School yearbook of the past.

The 2019 high school yearbook staff of the South Windsor High School, guided by Ed Duclos, had many yearbooks of the past, called Centurion, digitized for those alumni that may have lost their high school yearbook, for readers' enjoyment and as part of its efforts to preserve South Windsor's documents for future generations. We graciously thank them for allowing Patch to reprint some of those pages.

From the days when South Windsor and East Windsor shared Ellsworth High School, the East Windsor Historical Society has also digitized copies of the Ellsworthian, dating back to 1937.

For our initial offering, we go back exactly half a century, to pages 194 and 195 of the 1975 edition of the Centurion. Depicted are the ice hockey and gymnastics teams.

The hockey team had an outstanding season in 1974-75, compiling a 16-4 regular season record to win the Central Valley Conference championship. The Bobcats qualified for the CIAC state tournament, where they fell to eventual state runner-up West Haven. The following year, the CIAC split hockey into two divisions for the first time, and South Windsor captured the Division II crown, becoming the first team not from New Haven or Fairfield counties to win a hockey title.

Gymnastics had been a club at the high school, but became a varsity sport upon implementation of Title IX in 1972. By the 1974-75 season, there were 15 girls in the program; that number peaked at 20 in the late 1970s, when the influence of tiny Olympian Nadia Comaneci boosted interest in the sport nationwide.

I do have one question about the gymnastics photo: what is with the pants on the team manager?

All digitized yearbooks may be found at archive.org.