Ward Sutlive, Campus Carrier asst. sports editor
This spring, Berry College will open its first college athletics Hall of Fame. Several alumni athletes will be selected and honored for their achievements in sports. The Hall of Fame will be a digital display, but will also include plaques honoring the current selected alumni.
They will be located in the hall of the athletics office. These plaques will be switched out every year and replaced with the current recipients. That year’s previous plaques will be given to their respective owners as a memento of their time at Berry. Angel Mason, director of athletics at Berry, is spearheading this project.
“I think a Hall of Fame is a pretty traditional thing for Athletics,” Mason said. “[So after] just kind of talking to my team, we thought it would be awesome to honor our inner collegiate athletes.”
Classes of alumni will be honored every other year. In the coming years, a selection committee will choose up to five individuals, or one team and three individuals per class. This year, however, things will be different. The first class to be initiated into the Hall of Fame will be doubled, ending up as ten alumni or two students, or two teams and six alumni.
“I know [that] we’re doing a few more this inaugural year,” Cecily Crow, director of alumni and a member of the selection committee said. “But after that, it’s not that many.”
The Hall of Fame selection committee is made up of four different areas of Berry College: the Athletic Department, Alumni Relations, Advancement, and the Board of Trustees. Some Berry Alumni have joined the committee, including author Susan Bandy(70C), who has written several books on Berry sports history. Bandy is excited about the Hall of Fame, but would prefer a more physical version, instead of the informative electronic boards that will be located on the top floor of the Cage Athletics Center.
In order to get into the Hall of Fame, potential candidates need to be nominated. Nominations can only be made by both current and former Berry students, faculty or staff. They can be submitted at any time, and nominees who aren’t selected in their first year of nomination remain on file and will still be in consideration for up to 10 years. Athletes, teams, coaches and athletic administrators are all eligible for the Hall of Fame.
“So basically, the way that we process through the different categories [is by] trying to honor individuals, teams, people of high impact. coaches, and administrators,” Mason said. “[For] the nomination process, you have to be affiliated with Berry.” While this will be Berry’s first Hall of Fame for the college, Berry Academy did have one many years ago, which is still open to this day. Berry Academy was a high school located on Berry’s Campus that is now defunct. The Hall of Fame will be located next to the Dickie Hall of Sports History, a small museum in the Cage Athletics Center. It functions as a sort of tribute and museum to Berry’s athletic history. There are multiple different sections.
“Upstairs, in Dickie Hall, in left hand corner, there’s a screen which is interactive,” Bandy said. “[And] it’s all about the academy athletics and sports.”
Crow has two roles in the Hall of Fame. Aside from being on the selection committee, she’ll also help contact alumni who have been accepted into the Hall of Fame. Crow will invite those individuals to an alumni awards banquet that will take place in the spring, where all of the people selected for the Hall of Fame will be celebrated. She and her coworkers have been working to promote it through their different alumni chapters as well. Crow said that she is very excited about the upcoming Hall of Fame.
While the main purpose of this Hall of Fame is to honor all of the different people who are involved in the athletics department, there are a couple of caveats. For athletes and teams, ten years need to have passed since their graduation for them to be considered eligible. They also must have competed in a varsity sport. Coaches must have coached for at least five years and no longer be in that position in order to be considered. Athletic administrators must have worked with Berry for at least five years and can’t be active. These requirements help simplify the acceptance process in general.
“There are lots of Viking Alumni over the years that deserve to be recognized,” Crow said. “And unfortunately, we can only do so many per year.”
Mason and her team focused on multiple different details, such as considering how they would review applications and who would be involved in that process. They also wanted to make things as objective as possible and focus on the core of the project, which was to honor the athletics department.
Mason is excited for the Hall of Fame and is happy that she was able to get it approved.
“I think this is a very exciting time to be a part of Viking Athletics,” Mason said. “And to introduce this new way of acknowledging our past, while preparing for a very successful future.”