MORGANTOWN – Call it a highlight reel of heart.
When Nancy Pride Raley closes her eyes – her little brother is right there.
“I can still picture him,” she said. “He’s playing sandlot ball in Cassville. He’s laughing with his buddies. Everybody loved Duke.”
That was the late Ronald “Duke” Pride, perhaps the most noteworthy athlete in the history of University High School.
Don’t know him? You soon will.
This August, when ground is finally broken for that $4 million sports complex at UHS that will bear his name – with its baseball and softball diamonds and tennis courts – Duke’s athletic legacy at his high school alma mater will be cemented for sure.
Visit https://www.uhssportscomplex.com for computer renderings and to learn how you can continue to donate to the project.
“We’re just thrilled that we’re at this point,” Raley said after Tuesday’s meeting of the Monongalia County Board of Education.
“This is for Duke. It’s really for University High.”
All Heidi Metheny knows is that she’s happy she finally got the dirt on the Raley family.
Seriously.
Metheny, who launched the campaign for the complex in 2022 with her husband, Gregg, brought a bucket of it with her to said meeting, in fact, so Nancy could do the ceremonial groundbreaking.
Raley and her husband, John – who was also a sports star at University High – pledged $1 million to the project in 2024 that served as a late-inning rally of sorts to push it through.
The couple is moving to Texas this summer to be closer to their son and grandchildren in the Houston area, and won’t be here for the actual event.
Which is why Metheny delivered the ceremony to them, with that aforementioned offering from the UHS campus on Bakers Ridge.
Some things just run deeper, Metheny said.
“I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of becoming Nancy’s friend,” she said.
“I can get choked up just talking about her. I love you, Nancy. UHS is eternally grateful to you.”
While Metheny’s eyes welled, Raley’s crinkled with good humor.
“OK,” Duke’s big sister said, as she dug into the ceremonial soil with the ceremonial trowel.
“Let’s see if I can do this.”
A DUKE IS INSTALLED
The patriarch of the family, Wes Pride, bestowed his son with his eternal nickname early on, as Nancy Raley recounts.
Her, too.
Nancy was “Duchess,” as a little girl.
“Sure was,” she told The Dominion Post previously. “The Duke and the Duchess. My nickname never stuck, thank God. But Duke’s did.”
Barely out of his toddlerhood, and he was introducing himself in a very precise manner, his sister recalled.
“People would say, ‘What’s your name, little boy?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m Ronald Jacob Dukie Pride.’ Pretty cute.”
After he started playing organized sports, he didn’t need an introduction.
He was already a name by the time he hit the hallways of the original University High, when it was perched atop Price Street, just up that steep hill from the main campus of West Virginia University.
STANSBURY STIRRINGS
Duke graduated in 1963, as WVU was nestled in the twilight of a golden age of basketball.
Jerry West.
Hot Rod Hundley.
Air, full of dust from the rafters of the old Stansbury Field House on Beechurst Avenue.
The atmospheric phenomenon was a homecourt advantage and a homecourt quirk, at the same time.
Particles would be set free, as fans stomped their feet in appreciation each time Mr. Clutch would drive the lane, on his way to the Logo he would become.
They did it whenever Hot Rod would bring a defender up short, with a hardwood-comic flourish worthy of the Harlem Globetrotters.
At UHS, Duke was making feet stomp during his basketball days, also.
Once, he pulled down 54 points in a game, a memorable outing his big sister wasn’t so sure about, even if he was never one to boast.
“Duke, you’re lying. You did not score 54 points.”
“No, I really did,” he said, laughing. “I can’t believe it either.”
The sports page of The Dominion Post that next day gave agate validation of the feat.
THE SCORE THAT COUNTS
WVU, amazingly, didn’t recruit the townie for that sport, and when he tried out for the varsity squad in his freshman year in ’63, he was the last player cut.
That rare setback left him unmoored for a time, like Stansbury dust. He dropped out and joined the Army.
U.S. involvement in Vietnam was building, but Duke was spared a deployment in the jungle, riding out his hitch in Germany, instead.
Duke had a newfound direction when he got back home.
He enrolled as an education major at Fairmont State College. He was married with a daughter, and doing his student teaching at tiny Fairview High, in outlying Marion County. He was set to graduate.
The day before Thanksgiving in 1970, the family gathered in advance of the feast and holiday. Somebody found a football, and sides were picked for a game of touch.
Just like that, Duke was gone. A pulmonary embolism. He was 25.
Nancy Pride Raley loves looking back on her brother’s athletic prowess, but it’s really his personality that holds her heart, she said.
At UHS, he starred in the classroom, too.
Good grades and a good guy.
He was popular, and his friends included the kids who weren’t traditionally cool. Kids who would never hear people chanting their names from the stands.
Duke’s kids at Fairview did something after his untimely death that still moves her, nearly 60 years later.
“They wrote letters to us. That was his real legacy. He would have been a great teacher.”
