College Memories for a Dollar

My alma mater NC State has a pretty good college basketball program.  The neighborhood is pretty tough with Duke playing a few miles away in Durham and UNC playing in Chapel Hill.  Still, the team and their games are usually pretty entertaining.  In more recent years they have been to four NCAA tournaments in a row and done a little bit of damage while they were there.  Last year they took out the East Region first seed Villanova and advanced to the Sweet 16 before losing to Louisville.

However, when I was going to NC State times were a little bleaker.  There were a lot more bad moments with Sidney Lowe coaching the team than good.  State often started the season slow, made a run late in the conference schedule, chased a few teams out of the ACC tournament, and qualified for the NIT.  There were still some talented players on the teams, more a matter of coaching than anything else.  One of my favorites was forward Courtney Fells.  He was a great athlete who could do a lot on the court to help a team win.  Favorite Courtney Fells play.....

Fells never made it into the NBA, but has been a successful player in the D-League.  He also managed to have an Upper Deck autograph made because he was, at one point, a pretty good NBA prospect.

I found this card on COMC while I was trying to find a few cards to fill in some holes in sets from the last two years.  While I am not a huge basketball card collector I have been more and more into finding some of the cards of players I have enjoyed watching over the last decade since I moved to North Carolina.  I am surprised at how many of them have cards, often they do not cost much of anything.