On a vacant lot off Old Highway 27 in Stanley, in an era when girls didn’t have equal opportunity, Sue Carlton Whitley learned to play the games boys played, and excel. A decade before Title IX showed up in school gymnasiums, she already was becoming a master of the games.

“Everyone came down to our house to play ball, and I played with the boys. We had several kids who lived on that road, and there was a vacant lot and I played football, basketball and baseball with them growing up,” she says. “I had an older brother, and he played Little League, and I would go watch, because girls couldn’t play.”

Her freshman year at Stanley High – 1972, the year Title IX was born – girls’ options were limited: “All they had was basketball. They were a smaller school, and that’s all they had.”

So Whitley, 61, played. She played all through high school, after Stanley merged with Mount Holly High to form East Gaston. As an EG senior, she played softball in the fall, basketball in winter and threw shot and discus for the track team in spring. “I also ran one lap in the 440 or mile relay, but I wasn’t a sprinter. If it involved throwing, I could do it,” she says.

If it involved dribbling, shooting or hitting, she could do it, too. And it landed her in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.

Whitley – whose one-year-older brother Frank played football, basketball and baseball in high school – was on East Gaston’s first girls basketball team, when the school opened her sophomore year. The team was undefeated in conference play, went 15-1 in 1973-74 and Whitley was named Female Athlete of the Year, All-Conference and tournament MVP. She also was the first girl to score 1,000 points.

“It was my senior year, and they stopped the game and gave me the game ball. Then I took it over and gave it to my mother,” she says. At 5-foot-7 she played shooting guard and small forward, depending. True positions were different then, too. “We had a point guard, then two wings. We pretty much played an offense where we had one point guard, or three outside and two under the basket. So on offense, I played outside, and then on defense I played underneath.”

She also played second base and shortstop as a junior and senior on East Gaston’s first softball team, a team that won the first Gaston County championship. “I don’t think we officially added the team until I was a senior. We may have had a team, but it was more of a pick-up team,” she says. “We were 3A, and as a matter of fact, some of the 4A schools didn’t have teams.”

Her basketball skills were mentioned when she went college-hunting, but girls still were forging their way in such areas. Whitley went to college on an academic ride.

She chose UNC-Greensboro for its math program – a high school teacher had attended there – and she was awarded a Catherine Smith Reynolds Scholarship, “the best that UNCG offers. It was a merit-based scholarship. It could have been a full thing, but it was based on what your parents made.”

A success in the classroom – she also has a Master’s degree from UNCG – she also was a successful gym rat. “Everyone down at the gym thought I was a P.E. major, except the instructors, because I wasn’t in their classes. I played field hockey, basketball and softball. I met the basketball coach when I was there on my scholarship interview, and she also coached the field hockey team, and they had volleyball in the fall, and I’d never played either one,” she says.

But, so what?

“They had field hockey tryouts the week before volleyball, and I loved it. I played center/forward on the freshman team, then the goalie graduated, so I played goalie on the varsity team. I didn’t start on the basketball team until my senior year. When you’re 5-7, you’re not real tall in college. Softball was my best sport,” she says. “I played at shortstop two years and second base two years and started all four years.”

Her best memory, though, comes from basketball.

Whitley’s freshman year at UNCG, the team was playing a tournament at Winthrop. The opponent was Tennessee, coached by legendary Pat Head (later, Summit). “We tied up the game, and our point guard had fouled out in the second half, so I was playing when it went into overtime,” she says. “We beat them in overtime, and I scored the basket that beat Tennessee. I just happened to get a rebound and put it back in, right at the buzzer.”

Whitley moved to Rock Hill in 1988 because of her husband David’s job. She teaches eighth-grade math at Sullivan Middle School and coaches girls basketball. She has three married children and two grandchildren. And just when she thought she knew all of her academic and athletic accomplishments, she recently discovered another. Back in 1975, when she graduated from East Gaston, computers were not in the vocabulary. Stuff got recorded by hand.

“I found out I graduated No. 1 in my class in high school,” she says. “Because East Gaston was a combination of Stanley and Mount Holly, they didn’t have a valedictorian. But I was No. 1.”