Today, the Ravenscroft athletic program is a powerhouse, with 10 state championships in the last decade alone. So it may be surprising to learn that, in the early 1970s when the North Raleigh campus was new, the plan for athletics was to start small.
“[School leaders] wanted to start an athletic program, so we built one from scratch … and it turned out pretty well,” said Bill Holleman, who served as Ravenscroft’s director of health and physical education, soccer coach and, later, athletic director. “Hard work is what we built our program on, outworking everybody else we played against.”
An important part of the strategy, he added, was a focus on teams that did not require a lot of players to be successful. That strategy led to the Ravens winning their first state championships in tennis, with the boys team bringing home the trophy in 1974 and 1975 and the girls team matching those titles in 1975 and 1976.
With AD Bill Wilkerson at the helm, Ravenscroft student-athletes strove to make their mark as a new school. Tennis players had to mature quickly in their game, as they were playing against seasoned seniors from other independent and public schools.
“If you want to be the best you have to play the best,” Holleman noted. “Eventually there was a leveling out, and it came pretty quickly.”
It helped that the tennis teams, originally based at nearby North Ridge Country Club, attracted considerable talent, including Alex (“Andy”) Andrews ’77, Ava Watkins ’76, and Katharine Hogan Kane ’78. As experienced players, they anchored the teams that brought home those first state championships.
“I’d been a state champion [on the junior tennis circuit] since I was 12, so I was used to winning,” Watkins remembered. Kane, who grew up in a tennis-playing family and was also highly successful in tournament play outside of school, said she “had butterflies before every match. But when I started warming up, they disappeared.”
Andrews, who transferred after his freshman year to attend Woodberry Forest, would go on to success on the professional circuit. Winning a state championship at Ravenscroft, he said, “was pretty awesome.” He recalled that the 1974 championship match was played the same day as the school’s new tennis courts were dedicated in honor of his grandfather, John Hawkins Andrews. “It was a day to remember,” he said.
Before the end of the decade, Kane and her teammates would win a third championship, in 1978 (with the boys’ team adding another trophy in 1981), and two more Ravenscroft sports — boys soccer and football — would win state titles. It was in those early, ambitious victories that the school’s proud athletic history got its start.