MOULTRIE — Since Lynda Baxter Moseley coached the sport in Tallahassee for a number of years and has taught it in Moultrie for a half-century, one might suspect that tennis has always been her favorite sport.

Not so.

When she was a youngster growing up in Moultrie, basketball was the game she enjoyed playing most and she started for the Packerettes for three seasons, twice taking part in the state tournament for Ace Little’s teams.

The Moultrie High tennis teams she played on were unremarkable, but she was proficient enough to teach the sport for the recreation department, beginning in the summer before her sophomore year in high school.

She helped her cousin teach lessons that summer and the next year Moultrie Recreation Department director Jim Buck Goff paid her for her instruction.

She has been doing it every summer since.

Already honored by the U.S. Tennis Association for community service and by the Georgia Tennis Association as its Tennis Educator of the Year, Lynda Moseley will be honored by her hometown on Thursday when she is inducted into the Colquitt County Sports Hall of Fame.

She will join her mother, Betty Baxter, who was selected for the Hall of Fame in 2001.

The 2006 class also includes Nina Brannon Cooper, Jerry Croft, Richie DeMott, Jeffrey Moss, Veronica Freeman Reese, Dennard Robison, James Stancil, Jill Middlebrooks Stuckey and Lonnie White.

The banquet will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Colquitt County High cafeteria.

The 10 new members of the Hall of Fame will be introduced at Tom White Field at Mack Tharpe Stadium before Friday’s Region 1-AAAAA football game between Colquitt County and Valdosta.

Lynda Baxter began playing basketball at the Moultrie YMCA as a fifth-grader and got plenty of instruction from her mother, who was an outstanding athlete and played city league basketball in Moultrie.

When she was a freshman, Lynda was picked for the varsity team and was so excited that her heart rate rose and she failed to pass her physical.

Once she calmed down, she passed a later physical and appeared in one game for the Packerettes in the1956-1957 season.

The next three seasons, she was a standout out guard for the Lady Packers under coach Ace Little.

“I was a good defensive player,” said Moseley, who wore jersey No. 35 for the Packerettes. “Basketball was my best playing sport.”

In her sophomore and senior seasons, Moultrie qualified for the state tournament.

In 1958, Moultrie lost out in the first round, falling to Marietta 32-29. But two years later, the Packerettes finished third in the state.

Lynda also was in the band at Moultrie High. Wanting to be a majorette, she had to learn an instrument, but was wearing braces on her teeth. So she learned the drums and by the time she was a senior, she was a drum majorette.

She also played for the Moultrie High girls tennis team under Larry Hyde.

“We didn’t win any titles,” she remembers. “But we all had a good time.”

Years earlier, Nolan had taught little Lynda Baxter swimming and tennis at the Moultrie pool and courts, which were located where the current facilities are.

Soon enough, she was working summers for the recreation department, teaching tennis, swimming, folk dancing, volleyball, baton twirling and life-saving.

The Moultrie Observer ran a photo in its June 20, 1958, edition showing her giving instruction to four young students, Janice Barlow, Marlo Miller, Gay Freeman and Jan Horne.

Also as a youngster, she took 12 years of dance under Mary Pat Davis in Moultrie.

And she learned more about the sports she taught during the summers as a physical education major at Florida State, which she attended from 1960-1964.

While at Florida State, she was a member of the Racquettes, the university’s women’s tennis team, which just had been started several years earlier. Tennis was the only sport offered to female students then.

She also became one of the first female members of the Florida State Marching Chief’s drum section and was a member of the band’s honor society.

“I really loved being in the Marching Chiefs,” she says.

While she was at Florida State, she married high school sweetheart and former Packer football player David Moseley and the couple had a daughter, Holly, in 1963.

So she gave up band and tennis her final year at Florida State, but graduated with a degree in health and physical education in 1964 and was a member of the physical education honor society as well.

Her first job was teaching at a school in Greensboro, Fla., that had grades one through 12. The next year, she went to Rickards High in Tallahassee, where she started the school’s tennis program and taught for 24 years.

Her last 14 years in education were at Deerlake Middle School. She retired in 2004 after 39 years as a teacher.

She played recreation basketball while living in Tallahassee and in 1969 was on a city league team that won the women’s state championship.

But all those years she lived and taught and coached in Tallahassee, she was spending her summers in Moultrie, continue to give tennis instruction to the youth and adults in her hometown.

For nearly all of those last 50 years, she has run the City Tennis Tournament for youth. And in the early years, there was a district tournament for youth, which included teams from Moultrie, Bainbridge, Albany and other surrounding communities.

In 1968, Goff told her the Georgia Recreation and Parks Society had decided to hold its first state tournament.

Two years later, the Moultrie team was the state runner-up and in 1972 and 1973 and from 1978-1982 it won the state championship. The GRPA no longer holds state tennis championships.

The Moultrie tennis team also competed in the South Georgia-North Florida Tennis League. The league championship trophy was retired one year after the Moultrie team won it five straight times.

Moseley was honored for her contributions to tennis in 1986 when she received the U.S. Tennis Association’s Community Service Award at the organization’s National Tennis Teachers Conference in New York City.

In the letter she received informing her of her award, USTA recreation tennis coordinator Talbot Davis wrote: “The Community Service Award is presented to the individuals who have contributed to the growth and development of tennis at the grass roots level. Your outstanding work for many years in Moultrie qualifies you for this national honor.”

Also that year, Moseley received the Tennis Educator of the Year Award from the Georgia Tennis Association.

Through the years, she continued to attend clinics to help her learn more about the sports she was passing on to others.

And she also kept the recreation sport in perspective.

“We try to teach it as a lifetime sport,” she says.

She has help start a number of outstanding tennis careers over the years and declines to list her best or favorite players.

But one who thrived was her daughter Holly, who played volleyball for three years and tennis and basketball for four years at Lincoln High in Tallahassee, where she won the most outstanding female athlete award.

Holly Moseley Lewis went on to play tennis at Abraham Baldwin College and at Valdosta State and currently teaches physical education at R.B. Wright Elementary. She often helps her mother with summer tennis lessons.

Lynda enjoyed her daughter’s career as her mother had done years before.

“I was an only child, so my parents were very involved,” she says. “My dad was the band president and my mother kept scores at ball games.”

She also received inspiration and help from Goff, Little, Jim Nolan, Tom White, Ronnie Schreiber and Bill Christopher along the way.

And she says she is not ready to give it up.

“I’m still enjoying it,” she says. “It’s fun.

“The kids make it fun and the parents make it fun. They always give a lot of support.”