Southwest’s scorekeeper has seen it all as a Patriot — except for a state championship

One ordinary day in 2023, Terence Thompson II felt like he jumped forward in time.

One second, Thompson was walking around his house, normal as ever. Then he blinked and woke up in a hospital bed.

“I was so confused,” he said. “One second I was standing up at home, then I was in a completely different place.”

To Thompson, it felt like two or three seconds. In reality, he’d been in a coma for five days after going into diabetic shock, hitting his head and enduring a brain bleed.

After getting his bearings and talking to family members about his health, one of the first things Thompson thought of was the Southwest basketball team — he was the Patriots’ scorekeeper and had been absent for close to a week.

“I take it very seriously, some people say too seriously. My wife says I do a little too much,” Thompson joked earlier this week at a Southwest practice. “But I just love doing it. It makes me feel like part of the Southwest family.”

After weeks of recovery across which Thompson was itching to rejoin his Patriots, the scorekeeper returned — and a bit earlier than he was expected to after his health scare.

“He came back after (the coma) and I was like, ‘What are you doing here? Are you supposed to be back?’ It was crazy,” Southwest head coach Monquencio Hardnett said of his scorekeeper’s quick return to the team. “He’s always been so dedicated. We really love having him here, he does a lot for us. He’s always been a Southwest guy.”

The setback was only temporary for Thompson, a man who has lived and breathed Southwest basketball for as long as he can remember and was determined to get back to the team as soon as possible.

“When you say you got somebody’s back, you got to stick to it. I’m big on loyalty that way,” he said. “The scorebook doesn’t seem like the most important thing, but it’s big to be consistent and do it for them.”

With a championship game now on the horizon for the Patriots — one Thompson and many others have waited on for about 35 years — the scorekeeper is ready to be at the Macon Coliseum Saturday afternoon, pen in hand.

School pride and coming home

Thompson grew up around Southwest and obsessed over the school’s monolithic basketball program, which won some of its six state championships as he was growing up.

“My parents and their siblings almost all went there. My grandma’s got something like seven Southwest diplomas she’s hanging onto,” he said.

But when Thompson was supposed to go to school, Macon opened up Southeast. While the school formerly located on Anthony Road closed in 2004, it was where Thompson was zoned to attend when he was set to begin high school in 1990.

“I just about broke down thinking of going somewhere else,” Thompson said. “I moved in with an aunt so I could get the right zoning.”

He was able to attend his dream high school but just missed a state championship, as the Patriots took the trophy in 1989. 

Though Saturday’s showdown marks the boys’ first title game appearance since that ‘89 state championship, Thompson’s support did not waver asa manager for the team under legendary head coach Duck Richardson.

“I kept score a little bit when I was in school, although it was harder for me then, but mostly I loved being manager. I was part of a family,” he said. “Then I graduated in 1994, and after a little bit I was enlisted in the Navy.”

Thompson did not get back from the Navy until 2006. When he did get back home, it wasn’t long before he found his way back to Southwest’s court. He started filling in for the current scorekeeper in 2006, then took over fully in 2008.

Ever since, he has honed the stat-keeping skills he was taught, including a special method of stat tracking.

“He uses all these different colored pens, he’s got a pen bag,” Hardnett said of Thompson’s scorekeeping. “People see him and they’re like, ‘Oh, you got the pen bag?’ They recognize him.”

Thompson uses a color-coded system instead of the standard pencil mark-ups that other scorers tend to use. Instead of counting points, he marks down shots, both makes and misses. Red means two-pointers, green indicates shots from beyond the arc and blue represents free throws.

This means no writing out numbers for scoring, only keeping track of shots and tallying up scoring for each player at the end.

It also means switching between writing instruments pretty often.

“Say there’s a play where someone misses a free throw, someone misses a putback, and then someone makes a 3-pointer,” Thompson said. “That’s all three colors and it happens in something like five seconds. You get muscle memory, though.”

In more than 16 years of bookkeeping, Thompson has seen a lot of chaotic games. The hardest to score came this year, though, during Southwest’s postseason.

“That region championship game against Dublin, the triple overtime game,” Thompson said, remembering his zaniest night working the stat sheets for the Patriots with a grin. “I just ran out of room. They only have spaces for two overtimes, and even with that I was tight on space.

Thompson’s rainbow of ink and cleanliness on the paper is crucial to him, though, because of what the stats can mean to the team and its players.

Helping your family

When Thompson walks into the Central Georgia Technical College gym where Southwest is practicing Tuesday for the impending title game, it only takes a few seconds for a player to notice him.

Senior guard Brandon Ashley, one of the Patriots’ most prolific scorers this season and a key team leader, comes over right off the bat, dapping Thompson up and chatting for a moment.

A few other players drift over as there are lulls in the shootaround, greeting the scorekeeper with ease and familiarity.

“He’s definitely like an uncle to some of the players,” Hardnett said. “He’s part of the family. He has been kind of his whole life.”

Thompson said the stats he records and uploads to MaxPreps get more recruiting attention on the players, something that aligns with the broader goal of preparing them for the next stages of life and helping them grow athletically
and emotionally.

“No matter what you have going on, basketball is a release. It’s like it was in the Navy — when you get on that ship, you leave your personal stuff on the end of the pier,” Thompson said. “Coach Hardnett is invested in keeping them focused on basketball but also on them having a positive environment.”

It’s easy to tell Thompson is passionate about lots of things — his young son, Terance Thompson III; his wife, who he loves to talk sports with; the coaching staff. Southwest ranks high on the list.

“It’s a family. That’s one thing about this championship, some of those old ones they played in Atlanta,” Thompson said. “Now we’re in Macon, you’re coming to our house. I don’t care who we play, you put us in the Coliseum, it’s gonna be a home game.”

Now, for the championship game, Thompson will finally get to run the books at the Macon Coliseum, an honor he’s waited for since moving to a new school zone to be a Patriot.

“I’ve been doing the stat book all year, there were only a few games I didn’t fill out. I had COVID-19 for the East Laurens games, some got canceled because of the snow we got,” Thompson said. “But (during the playoffs this season) as we got closer in the tournament, I realized there was going to be exactly enough pages in the scorebook for a championship.

“There’s only one page left in this year’s book. It was fate, like it’s supposed to happen.”