Out & About Kentucky Style . . . Herbie Triplett

Over the years even high schools have been impacted by transfers. The earliest case I know of involved a basketball player from Inez High School. In 1954, the Martin County school from a town of 500 people won the Kentucky High School Sweet Sixteen in Memorial Coliseum in Lexington.

Inez played in the powerful 15th region from the mountains. Their marque player was Billy Ray Cassady, a gifted 6-2 player who would go on to play for Adolph Rupp at the University of Kentucky. But, it was a slight-of-build, 5-8 sophomore named Herbie Triplett, who stole the show in the championship 63-55 win over Newport Public.

Triplett’s 25-points were good enough to earn him a spot on the coveted All-State Tournament team, but what no one expected happened the next year when in 1955 Inez was knocked out of any chance of returning to the Sweet 16 when they were defeated in their very first district tournament game by Meade Memorial.

Meade Memorial wasn’t just any team. Ranked as one of the best in Kentucky, they were led by Donnis Butcher who later played and coached the Detroit Pistons in the NBA.

Even with a first-game exit Triplett still was good enough to earn first-team all-state recognition with still his senior year ahead of him.

Playing in the Louisville Invitational Tournament earlier in his junior year, the Inez star had drawn the attention of a certain fan in the crowd. It was Paul Walters who happened to be the coach of high school powerhouse Columbus East in Columbus, Ohio.

The high school laid claim to such stars as Bo Lamar, Jim Marshall, Chuckie Williams, Ed Ratliff, and Bernie Casey, and Walters, the coach, saw a player who could make a big difference in the prospects for his team. Even though his Co-lumbus team was all black it made little difference to him that the skinny kid from the mountains of Kentucky was white.

“They landed a job for my grandfather in Columbus with Rockwell International,” recalled Herb Triplett, Herbie’s son. “They recruited my dad, it was plain and simple. My grandfather felt it was a way to get his family out of the coal fields.”

With Herbie in the lineup and averaging 20 points, Columbus East reached the Ohio High School State Championship game where they fell to Middletown, led by Jerry Lucas and coached by legendary Paul Walker.

Lucas would become one of the greatest players of all time in America, and Coach Walker, originally from Madisonville, Kentucky, had played at Western for Ed Diddle.

Jim Richards had his take on playing against Triplett in the 1954 state tourney.

Richards, who coached Glasgow to the state title in 1968, and later became the head coach at Western Kentucky University, was a reserve on the Adair County team that lost to Inez 70-68 in the semifinal round.

“Coach (John) Burr would put me in to slow down an opponent who was quick and a good shooter,” Richards recalled. “Triplett was one of those in that game. He was scoring so I got to guard him.”

The following year Adair County lost to a Johnny Cox-led Hazard team in the state finals.

With Inez winning in 1954 and Hazard in 1955 when Carr Creek won it all in 1956, it showed how strong the teams from the mountains really were.

Triplett, an all-state player in two states, was good enough to get a scholarship offer to nearby Ohio State, but it only took three or four days for him to realize the huge campus was not for him.

A phone call to Morehead State coach, Bobby Laughlin would keep the former Inez star’s basketball career alive.

The rules back then prevented freshmen from playing varsity, so it wasn’t until the 1957-58 season that Triplett made his presence felt. Averaging just under 10 points a game on a team that featured All-American Steve Hamilton (later pitched for New York Yankees), Morehead finished second in the Ohio Valley Conference.

Now standing 5-10 and with some added weight, Triplett upped his scoring to over 16 points a game as a junior and 20 as a senior while earning All-OVC recognition.

Along the way, he married wife Eunice, a marriage that lasted 12 years.

“After college Herbie was burned out from basketball,” Eunice recalled. “He could have tried out with Detroit and Chicago professionally, but he said, ‘I’m tired . . . I don’t want to play anymore.’ ”

A career with IBM took him to Lexington, Colorado, and Florida, at the same time becoming very proficient in golf. He was good enough to become a professional golf instructor.

In 2009 he died in Florida.

As for big-time Kentucky athletes, Triplett’s career has stayed below the radar. But, what a life. Recruited out of state at a young age after playing on a Kentucky high school state championship team, playing for one of the top Ohio high school teams in the nation, wearing leopard skin color warmups and shooting layups to the tune of Sweet Georgia Brown, the kid from Inez in Martin County had seen and done a lot.

Now a few more people know.