By Andy Walter

Jim Harvey figures Jim Powell must have been around 85 one of the last times he saw him officiating a basketball game.

“I went down to Cape and he was running up and down the court at a JV girls’ game,” said Harvey, the former Caesar Rodney High athletic director and coach. “I just couldn’t believe that.”

In the six decades he spent in Delaware, Powell rarely strayed very far from the athletic fields or courts of the state.

When he passed away on Oct. 31 at the age of 87, he left behind a legacy of being involved in more things than seemed to fit into just one lifetime.

The head football coach at CR for much of the 1960s, Powell was one of a handful of athletic directors who helped found the Henlopen Conference in 1969. He later helped start and run the Slam Dunk to the Beach basketball tournament after he and Bobby Jacobs came up with the idea.

Born in Hell’s Holler, W. Va., Powell was a basketball referee for 52 years, but also found time to officiate baseball and softball as well as volleyball. He and his wife of 62 years, Kay, worked as the clock operators at Delaware State University basketball games for two decades.

When he wasn’t busy with sports, Powell was a Boy Scout leader, leading trips to New Mexico, and kept active in the local Methodist Church community. In 2007, he and Kay spent six months in Malawi, Africa, teaching at an orphan care center.

Other people knew him for his Penny Farthing High Wheeler bicycle (the one with the really big front wheel), which he rode in parades and on the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk. He and Kay moved to Lewes when he retired in 2000 after working for 36 years in the CR School District.

Harvey said the man seemed to have limitless energy.

“In the weight room, when he was still there (in school) in his 60s, he was benching 225 with the kids,” said Harvey, who was first hired by Powell and became lifelong friends. “So yeah, he stayed in shape.

“When he retired from CR, he just kept busy. Travel, officiating. ... he was well-rounded. A great guy, great guy.”

One of the many stories told about Powell was the time he was briefly fired as the Riders’ football coach.

It seems Powell had his kicker hit shorter, line drives on kickoffs when everyone else was booting the ball deep. According to Powell, a school board member told him to kick it like everyone else and Powell was fired for insubordination when he refused.

“I went to a meeting and when I came home, my yard was full, the house was full (of supporters),” Powell recalled in 2015. “Everybody rallied around and I was reinstated.”

Powell also told stories about shooting off small fireworks at games and feeding the players steaks in the cafeteria.
“We did a lot of things that nobody else around here did,” he said.

By the time he retired as coach in 1973, Powell had led CR from a 2-7 record to 8-2. He was also credited with hiring his successor, Joe Purzycki, who was Woodbridge’s coach at the time.

Purzycki coached the Riders to their first football state title in 1975.

One of Powell’s assistant coaches, the late Dick Ward, said Powell deserved a lot of credit for building CR’s football program.

“He got the program going,” Ward said six years ago. “He turned the program around. Jim was such a fantastic person to work with.

“When we got here, we had to change the whole attitude. The attitude of the school was losing. We had to change the attitude of the kids to winning. When we got that, if I’d have said we’re playing Notre Dame University next week, I’d expect all the kids to say, ‘We’re going to beat them.’ Once you’ve got that instilled in the kids ... attitude is 90 percent of the ballgame. It’s never stopped.”

“We tried to make it fun for them,” Powell said about his players. “They responded. We didn’t win every game but I was real proud of them. They were good kids.

“Everything worked out real well in the end,” he added. “I have no regrets. I had a great time there. Everybody was good to me, really, and the kids were super. They used to tell me I was crazier than they were.”

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Powell will be laid to rest privately at Barrett’s Chapel Cemetery. A celebration of his life will be held on Nov. 29 at 5 p.m. Friends may visit beginning at 4 p.m. For location and more information please send an email to JimPowellLifeCelebration@gmail.com.

A virtual guestbook is available at www.parsellfuneralhomes.com.