By Collin Brooks

Correspondent

Even though the wounds of a disbanded football team have healed for most of the former players and fans that garnered the Blue & Gold of ETSU, the bad memories were rehashed this past week with the news that the University of Alabama-Birmingham football program was introduced to the same fate.

The news created a fresh wound for ETSU’s head basketball coach Murry Bartow. While the coach has been in Johnson City for over a decade, it is in Birmingham that his families footprint is so deeply rooted.

His father, the late Gene Bartow, is heralded as the “Father of UAB Athletics” and was the man at the helm for all of the growth that took place in athletics at the school, including the installation of football in the fall of 1991.