Posts Tagged ‘2010 News’

Each year, the powerful and poignant words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reverberate throughout the packed Perry Reese Jr. Community Center during the Classic in the Country weekend, held in Berlin over the MLK holiday weekend. And each year, those words are pulled from an audio file of Dr. King’s greatest speeches. This year, however, as the Classic in the Country (CitC) preps for its seventh installment, coordinators decided to shake things up a bit, adding a Dr. King reenactor to deliver the infamous 18-minute “I Have a Dream” speech. Marvin Blanks, coined the “Orator of the Century,” will perform the speech immediately after Game 6 (Hathaway Brown versus Mount Notre Dame) on Saturday, Jan. 16 and before Game 7 (Potter’s House, Fla. versus Hiland).

Millions and millions of dollars have flowed through Holmes County the past six years over the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, a time in the middle of winter when tourism is at its weakest in the heart of Ohio’s Amish Country. That cash flow is attributed to the Classic in the Country, Holmes County’s high school girls basketball showcase, which has grown into one of the premier high school athletic events, not just in Ohio, but in the nation. Drawing hundreds of college scouts and coaches, tens of thousands of fans to Holmes County for a weekend full of basketball, entertainment and fun…