Print edition: 
Being part of a sports story is never our preference. But today, we’re there.
We’ve been reporting on Perry Ellis’ ascension to the top of the City League boys basketball career scoring chart for weeks. Heading into Heights’ game tonight at West, we’ve written that Ellis needs 38 points to break Greg Dreiling’s 31-year-old league record.
But we’ve been wrong. Ellis broke the record two games ago.
A double-check of Dreiling’s numbers show that he scored 1,888 points for Kapaun Mount Carmel from 1977-81 — not the 1,963 that we reported.
Ellis has 1,926 points, meaning he broke Dreiling’s actual mark during the Falcons’ Jan. 24 victory over Kapaun.
The error came about when the person researching decades of games copied Dreiling’s total from his junior season incorrectly. The mistake gave Dreiling 75 more points than he actually had.
Heights has three straight road games coming up, and coach Joe Auer said Ellis’ accomplishment probably will be commemorated at their next home game Feb. 17.
While Ellis is a star player who has shunned the spotlight, that doesn’t make our error any easier to stomach.
The Eagle has been the City League’s unofficial statistician since the league’s inception in 1957. For decades, we’ve taken pride in being the league’s historian and the source for standings and statistics.
Recently, a member of our staff began work on resurrecting career scoring leaders for City League boys and girls basketball. It’s painstaking work going through years of newspaper clippings, along with calls to athletic directors and former coaches.
Still, that’s no excuse for our mistake, one that shouldn’t have happened and one we will strive to make sure doesn’t happen again.
Congratulations to Perry Ellis on his accomplishment, one that came two weeks earlier than we thought.
