Sabens Came Close But Never Hit The 50-Point Mark

In a couple articles about a month ago, I focused on Mike Mitchell and Matt McCarty as being the only players to score 50 points or more in game. I got a lot of feedback from those two articles.

One person suggested I check on Ladoga’s high-scoring player, Fred Sabens. They sent an email saying they thought he had scored 50 or more points in a game against Granville Wells or someone in the 1950s.

So back to the record books I went.

I figured if anyone had done that we would have heard about it from good old Bill Boone, who has been searching the library and other records for much longer than I have. Besides, Boone is even an old Ladoga Canner himself who enjoyed quite the athletic career.

The best I could find for Fred Sabens was a 46-point effort against North Salem in a home game played on Nov. 11, 1957. That was good enough for a Ladoga school record, but not quite good enough for our 50-point exclusive club.

In that game against North Salem, though, Sabens made 19 field goals and eight free throws in a 90-48 win for the Canners — just the second game of the 1957-58 season. Yes, Sabens nearly outscored the entire North Salem team. He had plenty of help from Phil Jeffries who had quite a night himself. He tallied 31 points and the two sharpshooters combined for 77 points. Pretty good, but not quite as good as Mitchell and Phil Myers had the night they combined for 83 as we learned about a few weeks ago.

Sabens ended that season with 333 points and an average of 19.6 points per game. The 46-point game was the only time he ever scored more than 30 that season. The 333 points was the sixth-best single-season scoring mark for a Canner. Ladoga ended that season with a 6-14 record. As a junior, Sabens tallied 293 points. For his career, he ended with 629 points, which was good for eighth-best all-time for the school.

So, who were the Top 5 scorers all-time to wear a Canners uniform?

• Mel Todd (1953-56) with 823 points

• Paul Roahrig (1960-63) with 791 points

• Bill Boone (1952-56) with 786 points

• Dave Williamson (1968-70) with 760 points (only played two seasons)

• Tom Todd (1962-64) with 668 points

Looking back at the scoring records of some of these players, one thing was interesting. Several of them saved their best games for last. Consider the following:

• Dave Williamson ended his brilliant career with a career-high 35 points in a loss to Crawfordsville in the sectional. He did that his senior season when he scored a school-record 483 points and averaged 23.0 points a game.

• Jimmy Harshbarger had a personal best 34 points in his final game of his career in a sectional loss against Waveland in 1967. He ended his career with 471 points, good for seventh on the all-time scoring list.

• Phil Jeffries tallied a career-high 30 points in a sectional loss to Crawfordsville in 1959. He ended his career with 634 points, which was good for sixth-place on the all-time list.

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In last week’s article about the for coaches at Southmont, I put at “Rady was the coach at Southmont just one year before being let go.”

I later heard from the Hall Of Fame coach and he said that while many people thought he had been fired at Southmont, he actually resigned to the Winchester job. During the 20-minute conversation he said it didn’t really matter to him, but that statement wouldn’t be fair to the then Superintendent and Rady’s long-time friend, Bob Tandy.

I enjoyed the conversation with him, as I always do when we get a chance to talk, and told him I would set the record straight.