These days, there is nothing small about so-called small college athletics, and Jerry Hughes – the longtime athletic director of the University of Central Missouri – has been among its champions. Just walk across the Warrensburg campus. A $6 million fundraising effort has led to the football team’s new locker room, strength and conditioning center… Read more »
News
Year: 2016
Terin Humphrey
Arguably the beauty of the Olympics is that some star-gazing teenager or 20-something sweats away with only a hope and a dream. And, the next thing you know, they’re a household name across the country, climbing atop the awards stand a half a world away. In essence, that’s the story of Terin Humphrey, whose journey… Read more »
Jason Isringhausen
The truth is, Jason Isringhausen never intended to be a pitcher. In fact, he was a center fielder when he headed off to junior college. “Some scouts started coming around after seeing my arm, and I went to a couple of tryout camps, where they asked me if I ever pitched,” Isringhausen said. “I just… Read more »
L.J. Jenkins
Given all of his success, one might assume that professional bull rider L.J. Jenkins grew up on a ranch. Not the case, he says. Before he ever made it big, Jenkins lived in Strafford east of Springfield as well as the Highlandville-Spokane area of Christian County and attended Springfield elementary and middle schools. So how… Read more »
Steve Jenkins
His tucked-way office just off the gym might make a first-time visitor assume that nothing big has happened here. It’s oblong in design, and not even the size of a college dorm room. And yet from behind that desk – and out on the hardwood some 40 feet away – is where Evangel University men’s… Read more »
Doug Jones
In rural Wright County, not far from where his family ran a dairy and cattle farm, the kid who fell in love – first with baseball, then a girl named Calleen – is proof of a universal truth: If the big leagues never come calling, you can still make it big in small-town America –… Read more »
Corby Jones
When it comes to Corby Jones, he wasn’t happy just to be a football player. No, he was proud to be a Missouri Tiger. And there may be no better example than in 1997. Two years after vaulting to the starting quarterback as a true freshman, he was leading a fourth-quarter rally against No. 12… Read more »
Natasha Kaiser-Brown
So how in the world did Natasha Kaiser-Brown, who became an NCAA and Olympics standout, ever find her way to the University of Missouri? “It’s really kind of cool,” Kaiser-Brown said. “I was at the Junior Olympic Trials in Los Angeles, my junior year in high school. Right before I ran the 400 meters, this… Read more »
Joe Koestner
What began as a simple announcement over the loud speakers at St. Louis University High School in 1985, when the racquetball program needed a coach, became a success story that’s almost too hard to believe. Even Joe “Doc” Koestner, the coach himself, gets a kick out of retracing the roots of history. “It was the… Read more »
Susan (Bouldin) Kreklow
Years ago, Susan Bouldin would ride her bike 45 min utes from her family’s Webster County dairy farm into Marshfield to play volleyball, back at a time when the sport’s future was uncertain. And yet she kept churning, turning her passion into a coaching career, and eventually collided with her future husband, Wayne, a volleyball… Read more »
Wayne Kreklow
Years ago, Susan Bouldin would ride her bike 45 min utes from her family’s Webster County dairy farm into Marshfield to play volleyball, back at a time when the sport’s future was uncertain. And yet she kept churning, turning her passion into a coaching career, and eventually collided with her future husband, Wayne, a volleyball… Read more »
Jim Lemen
Sometimes, life pulls the string on your coaching whistle and leads you on a path you never envisioned – and for the better. Jim Lemen had never heard of The John Burroughs School in St. Louis until he was well into a master’s degree program at Harvard University in 1963. At the time, John Burroughs… Read more »
1975 Licking High School volleyball team
In the summer of 1975, as word spread in the small community of Licking that MSHSAA would hold its first state volleyball tournament in the fall, team captains Glenna (Driesel) Adovasio and Trish (Kissiar) Knight rounded up the troops and regularly walked over to the house of the high school janitor. After all, before you… Read more »
Mark Littell
His dad played catch with him only once, but only because his dad had been shot in the right arm and took on shrapnel from an explosive device during the Korean War. Years later, he was cut in tryouts for a travel ball team in his Missouri Bootheel hometown of Gideon. And yet Mark Littell… Read more »
Lennies McFerren
A coach with nine state championships to his name, who grew up in an era when he and his friends used the rim of a bicycle tire as a basketball goal, believed this: Teaching players life lessons was far more important than winning alone. “I suffered a few losses just to make a point. That’s… Read more »
Med-Pay, Inc.
The first time Med-Pay, Inc. became involved with the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame was, believe or not, before there was a Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in Springfield. Back in the early 1990s, as founder John Q. Hammons traveled the Show-Me State and sought a community eager to house the Hall, the Springfield News-Leader… Read more »