One last goodbye.

That’s what several hundred current and former Dover students, athletes, coaches, teachers, cheerleaders and more will offer up on Friday night.

Dover Schools’ “old gym” will host one more night of basketball when the Lady Longhorns and Longhorns welcome Ninnekah into town.

It’s being dubbed “The Final Farewell.”

The gym - and the elementary that surrounds it - is scheduled to be torn down this summer as the new facility is expected to be completed by spring.

“Just in talking with people, I can tell there’s a ton of sentimental attachment to it,” said Dover Superintendent Jay Wood.

“It holds a lot of memories for a lot of people.”

One of them is Cathy Howard. She began teaching at Dover in 1978 and retired in 2011.

Howard was the elementary principal from 1990-2002.

When her career began, Dover’s games were still being played in the gym with the wooden bleachers, very little room on the sidelines and a stage at one end.

“Steve Shiever asked if I’d like to keep the scorebooks,” Howard recalls of the request of Dover’s superintendent at the time.

The school’s clock keepers were Steve Mendell and Tim Geis. They showed her the ropes.

Howard then kept the books at Dover’s home games for 33 years, the first couple of them in that old gym.

But the gym wasn’t just about basketball.

It hosted assemblies, Bingo during the school carnival, P.E. classes, plays, music performances, graduations, coronations, awards ceremonies, was the site for recess when it was rainy or too cold outside and was the longtime host of Kingfisher County Fine Arts’ mixed chorus performances.

The old gym has done it all… and Howard has memories of it all.

“I remember getting the gym all spiffed up for Fine Arts every spring,” she said. “It was like cleaning your own house when you’re having company.”

She emceed the event for several years and made sure to ask the audience how many of them had performed in that very gym.

Dozens and dozens of hands rose to the air each year.

Even Howard herself performed there when she was an elementary student at Lacy.

She’s been taped to the east wall as a reward for students earning goals in a reading challenge. She was there when Mary Jo Bullis led a campaign to raise money for new curtains for the stage in the 1990s. She recalls the Longhorn being painted on the front of the scorer’s table and when one was painted in the center circle.

Howard has twirled the whistle around her finger for many a recess in there as well.

“It was a wild and crazy place for indoor recess,” she said.

But there were rules. “I remember the days when the gym floor was treated with great respect,” Howard recalled.

“‘Don’t walk on the floor with street shoes!’” More recently, the gym had to serve as an actual school.

When Dover’s high school burned to the ground in January 2016, temporary classrooms were set up in the old gym and students attended classes there for two years until the new one opened.

But the elementary school - in use for more than 100 years - has been in decline.

School officials said the elementary was nearing the point of being deemed “uninhabitable.”

It’s full use had been realized and Dover voters in August 2020 passed a $15.6 million bond issue for a new elementary by a vote of 117-23.

It includes a practice gym/multipurpose room and is expected to be ready for students at the end of spring break.

Once the new facility is completely ready for use, Wood said the old one will be torn down.

But that won’t happen before one last major contest in the gym, which hasn’t hosted high school games regularly since the early 1980s when the “new gym” was completed.

Phil Humphrey and Jim Lamer were the school’s coaches in the last season before the move.

The older facility continued to host some fifth and sixth grade games and served as a practice facility for the high school teams.

But on Friday, it gets one last time to shine.

Howard will be there. Shiever is expected to be in attendance as well. All former coaches - whether they coached in the old gym or not - have been invited.

And so has anyone who ever played, sang, performed, recessed, taught or anything else in the gym.

Dover plans to make a full night of it.

Tours of the new elementary will begin at 4 p.m.

A chili and bean supper will begin being served at 4:30 p.m. in the cafeteria.

The girls game will tipoff at 6:30 and will be live streamed on Skordle.TV for those who can’t make it.

At halftime of the girls game, alumni, former teachers and staff members, administrators and the like will be recognized.

Commemorative t-shirts have been ordered and Dover is even selling the vintage spirit ribbons so often worn for games in the old gym.

“The old gym is obviously a place nobody will ever forget,” Wood said. “So we want to make it a night fitting for those memories.”