MOULTRIE — After Janelle Lacey Robinson scored 51 points to lead the Norman Park girls to a victory over cross-county rival Doerun, she led the Trojanettes back to the dressing room, which had a piano.

While Willa June Giddings Teal played, the team sang and celebrated loudly.

So loudly, in fact, that someone had to stick her head in the door and tell them to tone it down. No one could hear the officials whistle at the boys game going on outside the dressing room door.

And that was Janelle Lacey Robinson: an outstanding basketball player and smiling, fun-loving teammate.

And it was her teammates who nominated Robinson for the Colquitt County Sports Hall of Fame.

A number of the Trojanettes who played with her are expected to attend the Oct. 22, banquet, where Robinson and the other members of the Class of 2009 will be inducted.

And although Robinson died in 1982 at 43, her nomination was not one made out of sympathy.

In three seasons as a starter for the Trojanettes from 1954 to 1957, she scored 1,391 points.

As a senior, she averaged 27.7 points a game, which Jack Flowers, writing for the Atlanta Constitution, noted was the highest average in the state in 1957 by either a boy or girl player.

Teammate Carol Lewis Bailey remembers Robinson often hitting nothing but net from what today would be 3-point distance.

“She was so good,” Bailey said. “You just don’t realize it until you go back and look. She was a natural athlete and worked hard to perfect her game.”

As a freshman, Janelle Lacey played guard and guards in the days of three-forward, three-guard basketball did not score.

The next season, coach John R. Lindsey moved her to forward and got her in 11 games, during which she scored 142 points. As a junior, she began to display her outstanding scoring ability, pouring in 501 points.

Her 51-point effort against the Does was just one record she set as a senior at Norman Park. She also became the school leader in most free throws (298) and most field goals (225) in a season. At one point, she hit 24 free throws in a row.

She did not get the school’s high free throw percentage record, however. That was set in her junior season by senior Shelby (Jean) Stephens Daniell.

Robinson, Stephens and Carolyn Wilson Calvert were an outstanding trio in the Norman Park front court in the 1955-1956 season.

That year, Norman Park was the first team to defeat defending Class AA state champion Moultrie High, winning 46-45, in Norman Park. The Trojanettes beat the Packerettes again in Moultrie later in the season.

Norman Park had a number of other outstanding players during those years, including Bailey, a fine defensive player who played 86 consecutive games for the Trojanettes.

Also among their teammates were Phyllis Whisnant Meeks, Gloria Fay Purvis, Donna Horne Mills, Helen Dorsey Beal, Dollie McKellar Crumley, Margie Garrett and Juanita Wildes Jones.

 Janelle Lacey was a farm girl from the Ty Ty community and she often found it difficult to return there after games. And she often missed school during spring planting and fall harvesting.

But, Bailey recalls, “She always made the effort to be there on time and play 100 percent.”

Armed with what Bailey calls “a wonderful sense of humor and an infectious laugh,” Robinson was named by her senior classmates at “Most Dependable” and “Most Popular.”

In addition to being co-captain and then captain of the basketball team, she also held offices in the Block N Club, Student Council, her class, 4-H Club, FHA, Library Club and the annual staff.

It was during her senior season that Robinson began to exhibit the symptoms of lupus, the autoimmune disease that would cause her death in 1982.

And although the disease went undiagnosed until she was in her 20s, she never allowed it “to adversely affect her basketball play or her friendly personality,” Bailey remembers.

When she was a junior in high school, she married Georgia Horace Robinson Jr., who farmed in the Ty Ty area.

The two had two sons who also were outstanding athletes.

Oldest son Greg played quarterback at Colquitt County High, went into coaching and is now the head coach at Houston County High.Younger son Horace was an all-region offensive lineman for the Packers.

“She was such a wonderful person,” Bailey says of her teammate. “She was a hard worker on the farm, in school and especially on the basketball court.”