John Alosi - Inducted 2007

---

INDUCTED 2007

John Alosi made a career out of shining a light on other peoples' accomplishments as the first full-time sports information director at Shippensburg University. Tonight, though, it's time to celebrate Alosi,

and the unique role he had in creating a vibrant sports scene at Shippensburg.

Alosi, a native of Coopersburg, PA grew up an average athlete but a rabid fan, someone who is thrilled by the human stories and drama that draws so many of us to sports and keeps us consistently coming back for more. He graduated from LaSalle University in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in history, but in short order was drafted into the US Army. There, Alosi earned his own boot camp experience in journalism, serving as an information specialist in Vietnam from January 1970 through April 1971.

Alosi's father had been transferred along the way to Shippensburg, as a manager at the now defunct Phoenix Clothes plant. When the son was discharged, he decided to accept his folks' new hometown as his own. As fate would have it, administrators at Shippensburg had just decided to bite the bullet and hire a sports information director. Young Alosi, already working at a local loan company, saw the notices, interviewed, and got the job.

Thus began a rich and pioneering 32-year career highlighted by stories like a national championship field hockey team; multiple Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference titles in a variety of sports; or the crazy weekend in 1979 when, for one of ESPN's first college football broadcasts, Shippensburg and Slippery Rock squared off at Michigan Stadium. The 61,000 fans at Michigan Stadium Alosi notes, is still the largest crowd ever for a Division II athletic event. In the end, Alosi would prove as versatile as any athlete in this Hall of Fame, making sure the stories of hundreds of Shippensburg athletes in sports ranging from field hockey to football found their audience, be it friends and family reading a hometown weekly or far-flung alums connected to their old school only in cyberspace.

Nor did his talents stop at the playing field. In 2001, Alosi added to our understanding of Midstate history with the publication of his book "Shadow of Freedom" which chronicled the slow disappearance of slavery in 19th Century Cumberland County.

By the time he retired in 2004, Alosi was credited with creating a model for the modern-day sports information shop. His peers have recognized him for it in various ways, including a lifetime achievement award from the College Sports Information Directors of America in 2005. Looking back, Alosi said his lifelong, if somewhat accidental link with sports has been a source of constant enjoyment, not the least of which were the relationships made with colleagues, coaches, student-athletes and the press corps. "I thought this was something that would be a nice niche for me," Alosi said, "and that turned out to be the case. It has been more like a hobby than a job."

INDUCTED 2009

Just back from a tour in the Army, with the Nazi Menace soundly defeated, Tom Carroll was seriously pondering his next move from his Philly neighborhood. Bartending school? Acting? Either one might have been a great fit. But a lifetime later, Carroll sure sounds glad he listened to his older brother, Joe, who counseled going to college and pursuing a career as a teacher and coach. Sports had done great things for Tom Carroll as a boy in West Philadelphia and turns out they would ultimately open a career path that would eventually see the younger Carroll do great things for thousands of other families during 32 years as a teacher, coach and administrator at Chambersburg High School.

For 19 years there, from 1973 to 1992, Carroll served as the Trojans' athletic director, a role that he loved for its opportunities to maximize student participation in sports, and to promote the school's activities as a rallying point for the community. If Carroll has to name one  accomplishment, it's probably his work in building student participation in Chambersburg's sports, from middle school through varsity, to more than 1,400 annually. A big believer in the benefits of physical and extra-curricular activities for kids, Carroll seemed to make it a personal crusade to try to find a spot for anyone at Chambersburg that wanted to try. That meant opening the doors to a steady flow of new girls' programs, including gymnastics, cross country, volleyball, softball and soccer. But to Carroll, that

mission also meant starting programs like boys' and girls' rifle teams to reach other groups within the school and boosting cheerleading membership from 10 to 30. Having brought all these families into the game, Carroll also worked hard to make sure each team had some time in the spotlight. He was one of the region's first athletic directors, for example, to play baseball, soccer, field hockey and even cross country under the lights. 

Carroll served three years in the Philadelphia schools after graduating from Temple in 1951, but decided to venture beyond the city after recognizing it would likely be many years before he could land a head coaching position. That led to brief stops in the Southern Fulton School District, where Carroll not only got his coaching shot, but also some early administrative experience, and later at the North Hagerstown High School in Maryland.

Carroll came to Chambersburg in 1960, serving first as a teacher, head boys' track coach, and assistant to then head football coach Bob Kinderman. In his nine years as track coach, Carroll's teams posted a 63-l O record in dual meets, and the coach thrived on regular competition with fellow Hall of Famers like Carlisle's Stanley Morgan. Carroll also served as head football coach for seven years - boasting a 38-33 record capped by seasons of 8- l- l in 1967, 9- l in 1968, and 7-3 in 1969. Carroll's teams saw eight players selected to Pennsylvania's Big 33 squad, and he was named head coach of the state all-star team in 1971.

As a coach, it is fair to say, Carroll prized effort and determination the most. One former runner remembers Carroll's pre-meet pep talks where the coach said he wanted to see "the veins popping and the spit flying" at the finish line. Others recall him drumming a group of kids out of the gym who, during a one-win basketball season, thought it would be funny to come to a game with bags over their heads. Not so to Carroll, for whom the gag could only be seen as intolerable disrespect for the team's effort.

Chambersburg came to prize Carroll for all of the above. To this day, the school awards a "Tom Carroll Award" each year to that student athlete who most befits Carroll's legacy of teamwork, positive attitude and determination.

For Carroll, now retired in Ocean View, NJ, the road taken and the people he's met along the way have rewarded him many times over. "I just wanted to better the programs for the kids because I think high school sports can be so important in getting kids to go to a higher level, not just athletically but academically as well. When you look at how things have gone, and you get good feedback from your former students and coaches at this stage in your life, it makes it all worthwhile," Carroll said. "As you get older, those kind of rewards are just priceless."

INDUCTED 2009

The 1950s were a glory era for Carlisle High School sports, with consecutive team titles in 1954, '55, and '56 in football, basketball and track & field, and Lee Castles was right in the middle of it all. He was a starting tackle on three varsity football teams that only lost one game, in total. He was a starter on a basketball team that won back-to-back South Penn Conference titles in dramatic fashion. In track and field, he was a district champion in the high jump, and a key contributor to two straight team titles.

To Castles, the joy was all his, as he considers it his highest privilege to have played for a set of coaches that set the modern-day standard for the Thundering Herd: Ken Millen in football; Gene Evans in basketball; and Stanley Morgan "That was probably the most fortunate thing that could happen to anybody," said Castles, recalling his three years with those mentors. Ask Castles to pick his favorite sport and he demurs, largely out of respect for all his coaches and teammates.

He believes that football, where he was a top vote-getter for the South Penn all conference team in 1956 as an end, was his best sport. Castles played tackle and end as a defensive star for three Millen era teams that went 9-0-l in 1954; 10-0 in 1955; and 8- l- l in 1956. That was good for two conference titles and a share of a third. Castles was also selected to the all-conference team as a junior and added all-state honors to his accomplishments as a senior.

Yet many older Carlisle fans may best remember this crew for their 1956 championship season in basketball, when a team led by Clyde Washington and Norm Neff had to pull off three wins in a row against nemesis Middletown; first to tie Middletown in the second-half race, then to nail down the second-half title, and finally to win the overall title. Castles, a 6-foot 4-inch center, was dominant in the Middletown series, grabbing 31 rebounds in the middle game to cement that victory.

But Castles will also tell you that his greatest individual satisfaction just may have come from track, where he excelled at the high jump, discus and middle distance runs for three seasons. Castles used his height to win a district title in the high jump as a senior and was part of a third-place mile relay team at the Penn Relays in 1955 and '56. And, of course, there were more team titles. Carlisle won its second straight South Penn Conference track title in the 1955-56 school year, aided by Castles' conference record high jump of 5' 8".

Castles stresses the team in all of this, arguing any personal glory was merely a reflection of teammates like Washington, Neff and Bill and Ben Rowe. To any of his coaches, however, there was another defining theme for Castles, who was a three-sport letterman in each of his sophomore, junior and senior seasons. "I was very, very competitive. I wanted to win, and I worked hard at it."

After leaving high school, Castles weighed various scholarship offers to play football at places like Penn and the University of North Carolina, but he ultimately banked his competitive fires and opted to go into his family's lumber and hardware business. He has served as a business and civic leader for the past 50 years. For Castles, tonight's induction is a bit of a homecoming. "This is something that I've looked toward to because a lot of the guys that I played with are already in this Hall. To be part of it with them now, that's a very, very big thing for me."

INDUCTED 2010

When winning becomes a habit in a program, sometimes players, parents and fans need a little different perspective to fully understand how good they have it. Here's a different perspective on Bobby Davis' 21 years as head softball coach at Shippensburg University (16 seasons), Shippensburg High School (four seasons), and Chambersburg High School (one season). Over 21 years as varsity head coach at those three schools, Davis's team compiled a cumulative record of 529-234-4, for a career winning percentage of .693. In a 62-game major league baseball season, that equates to going 112-50. Thus, possessed with one of the shiniest won-loss records any career baseball/softball coach has ever registered in this area, Davis - known for pouring everything he has into the job and demanding the same from his players - fittingly takes his place tonight as a member of the South Central Chapter of the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame.

None of it really happened by design. As longtime president of the Guilford Area Little League near Chambersburg, Davis, a computer systems analyst at Letterkenny Army Depot by day, contented himself with building an age-group program with a great emphasis on preparing coaches who could really teach the game. While adding fast-pitch softball for the girls and working to improve facilities, Davis himself stayed out of coaching directly. League rules prohibited board members from leading teams of their own.

But when Davis' daughter Donna started playing high school ball for Chambersburg High, the school's head coach at the time coaxed a reluctant Dad into joining him as a volunteer assistant. What he might not have known was that Davis always wanted to coach, and he had a lot of ideas to bring to the table. The rest, as they say, was history. By the next year, that coach had resigned and Davis spent the 1983 season as Chambersburg's head coach - taking the Trojans all the way to an appearance in the PIAA's softball "final four" - before his good work led to recruitment by Shippensburg University.

After one year as an assistant at the collegiate level, Davis took SU's head softball job in 1985. He would stay for the next 16 years, going 449-204-4 and leading the Lady Raiders to five NCAA Division II tournaments along the way.

A mild stroke then kept Davis away from softball for a few years, but after recovering he dove back in with a successful first postlude at Shippensburg High School from 2005 through 2008, including leading the Lady Hounds to the state championship game in 2005.

For all his accomplishments on the field, Davis prides himself most on that coach's secret pleasure, the certainty that in most cases, he helped his kids see what their true potential could be, on and off the field. "I very much enjoyed working with the kids, being with them and getting everything out of them I could," Davis said. At Shippensburg High School, 85 percent of his players went on to college, Davis noted. At Shippensburg University, his teams' collective grade point average was consistently among the top two or three of all the teams on campus.

Retired from federal government service and an Air Force veteran, Davis and his wife Pamela live in Chambersburg. He is still contributing to softball by the way: In what he expects will be his final chapter as a coach, the 75-year-old Davis signed on last year to help rebuild the softball program at Penn State Mont Alto. Play ball!!!

INDUCTED 2009

Bob Eavenson took the road less traveled to a familiar place with his induction into the Hall of Fame tonight. Eavenson comes to the hall on the basis of his career as a rare male coach in high school field hockey. That's right, field hockey. Not swimming, soccer, football or baseball - the more well-worn paths that brought Eavenson's brother Dave, and their father, David Sr., into this circle of sports dignitaries. Field hockey. A sport that Eavenson confesses he never played or even remembered watching during his years as an "average" baseball player at Carlisle High School or later at West Chester University.

This wasn't by any master plan. In fact, after his college graduation, Eavenson went to TC Williams High School in Alexandria, VA., solely to become a math teacher. But the son of a college athletic director, he knew his way around the ballfields and answered the bell in the early 1970s when some of his girl middle school students were in desperate need of a soccer coach. From that good turn, Eavenson eventually wound up as the first girls varsity soccer coach at TC Williams, a post in which he was paired with a junior varsity coach, Shawn Noel, who happened to be the high school's head field hockey coach. By 1980, Noel had talked Eavenson into a learn-on-the-job role as her assistant, and after years of clinics and watching college games around the area, the sport "just grew on me," Eavenson recalls. By 1986 the head job was his.

One reason he liked it, he said, was the feeling of a level playing field. Soccer in northern Virginia by that point had become so dominated by age group and club programs, there were many schools, Eavenson found, that had ingrained advantages by high school. Field hockey, by contrast, "was a sport that for a long time didn't have a lot of youth leagues, so girls were just starting in the sport when they were entering high school It seemed to be more of a level playing field." Eavenson thrived in his newfound sport, posting a 22-year coaching record of 171 -147-26 with two district championships and one appearance in the state semi-finals. 

But like many coaches, Eavenson said it is the close relationships with players that he treasures the most. He loves that an annual alumni game at the start of the season regularly draws 25 to 30 players, from recent grads to women in their 30s. He is thrilled that the four assistants in the TC Williams program he left two years ago are all past players. Others are doctors, lawyers or law enforcement professionals. "That's what I really take the most pride in," Eavenson said. "That I made a contribution,

maybe a small contribution, for them to go on and be successful in life."

Eavenson is continuing his career as assistant director of athletics at TC Williams, the high school made famous by the "Remember the Titans" feature film about its first football season after forced desegregation of the Alexandria schools. Ironically, Eavenson was in his first year as a math teacher when that 1971 season unfolded. In his current position, he is in charge of maintaining the "Remember the Titans" exhibit that keeps the valuable lessons learned from that year on public display.

Tonight, Eavenson takes special pride in that his personal road less traveled is leading him back into the company of his father and brother, both of whom he has always considered his prime role models as players, coaches and administrators.

INDUCTED 2009

Leave for others the glory of hoisting trophies or enduring the sleepless agony of defeat. For Jim Ellingsworth, success came to be defined as an event that started on time, where everyone got to compete on a level playing field, and spectators and players alike went home commenting on the performances they just saw as opposed to grumbling about officiating, substandard facilities or poor food. Such is the career arc of a guy who started out as a teacher and football coach at Big Spring High School in Newville, but who grew into the school's athletic director role and became a major contributor to high school sports in general at the conference, district and state levels over the last 20 years. Here's a brief look at some of the things you've heard about over the years but may not have known Ellingsworth's role in:

Expanded district basketball playoffs: It used to be that only 16 teams made the district playoffs, based on a somewhat subjective power ranking. Ellingsworth argued that in a district as large as District III, where teams from Reading and York literally never had common opponents, relying on a power ranking was arbitrary at best. He successfully made the case for an expanded field, open to any team that posts a record of .500 or better. "I just saw it as an opportunity for more teams to get in so that maybe we didn't miss somebody."

Expanded state football playoffs: Same principle, Ellingsworth thought it was ludicrous for the state to have payoffs opened to only four teams statewide. The current format, allowing for 16 teams in the largest brackets and eight in the smallest, gives a lot more students and schools the opportunity to experience that, Ellingsworth said. As a longtime cross country official, meanwhile, Ellingsworth oversaw the introduction of several generations of new timing technologies in Mid-Penn conference and District III meets that were gradually adopted for the state championships. He was also the leader of a crew that performed a week-long video review to sort out problems with a PIAA state cross country meet finish that had been marred by a runner's finish chute fall. For those efforts, Ellingsworth was twice named the state's cross country Official of the Year. Finally, he was also a member of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association's board of directors from 1999 through 2006, a critical time when the organization faced tough scrutiny for a series of decisions from legislative leaders and others and was able to successfully reform its operations while preserving its independence. For Ellingsworth, named the state's "Athletic Director of the Year" in 2003, it was quite the career for a kid from the tiny coal town of Seanor in Cambria County.

Ellingsworth arrived in South Central Pennsylvania in 1969 as a Shippensburg University student and football player and never left, settling in in 1973 as a 6th-grade teacher and assistant football and track coach at Big Spring. By 1983, he had earned the head football and athletic director's job at Big Spring, a dual role he filled through 1989, when he felt the entire program would be better served if he concentrated on one.

By that point, Ellingsworth, who was the Mid-Penn Colonial Division Coach of the Year in 1987, said his choice was clear. "I'd have to say that once I got in and got a taste of the administrative side, that sort of became my love," Ellingsworth said. "I enjoyed organizing all the activities, doing all the details that it took to try to run things first-class. That was one of the things that I took pride in."

Big Spring did not suffer for Ellingsworth's involvement in weighty policy matters at the league, district and state levels. During his tenure in Newville, Ellingsworth oversaw the development of several new girls and boys athletic programs, spearheaded the effort to install new lights and bleachers at the football stadium, and supervised planning for the Bulldogs' beautiful new gymnasium and natatorium. He lobbied for a new weight room and framed the entrance to the gym with dozens of Bulldog team photographs. And, like the former coach and player he is, he always hoped for a Bulldog win. "I've always said that I felt every one of the athletes was like my kids," said Ellingsworth. "When they won, I was happy for them. When they lost, I agonized with them."

Ellingsworth retired from his district responsibilities after the 2005-06 school year. By then he had clearly left his mark in Newville and beyond. But Ellingsworth believes his career is also a testament to the value that involvement in sports can bring to anyone. "I think it teaches you about work, how you have to set goals and how you have to work hard to attain them. Because things just don't happen.

INDUCTED 2008

The best part about Dennis Frew's 28-yeor run as head football coach at Delone Catholic High School may not be the 220 wins and the consistent excellence that represented. Sure, that's a lot of good times for the Squires' fan base. But just as good for him, Frew says, is the roughly 200 players that his program sent into college programs at all levels, kids that through Frew's work and their own got the chance to continue academic and athletic careers at schools of all levels.

It was that success, Frew notes now, that let him honor a key helping hand he received in the mid- 1960s as a prep athlete coming off an injury-shortened senior football season in his hometown of Monessen. "I thought my football career was over," Frew said. But a local businessman who had benefited from college sports at Duquesne University asked Frew's father if he could pass his son's name to an acquaintance in Iowa who was looking for football players at Midwestern College in Denison, Iowa.

A partial scholarship deal later, and Frew was on his way to college and, eventually, a degree that would set him up for a long and successful career in public and private schools. The only thing his patron asked in return, Frew said, was: "If you ever have the opportunity to get another person into college, that'll be all the thanks that I need." "And so, I've worked very, very hard trying to help kids further their education," Frew said, from putting together highlight tapes for his kids, to contacting college coaches and recruiting services, to giving players straightforward advice about where they might look. Success helped.

Frew is here tonight in recognition of his stellar record at Delone that besides the 220-101-3 career record, includes 14 District III playoff qualifiers in the highly competitive Class AA class since 1982, when the football playoffs began, and six district titles. What that meant was that, over time, many college coaches kept an eye on the players in Frew's program to begin with.

For the coach-who balanced his sideline work with a day job as a physical education teacher and eventually dean of students at the McSherrystown school where he started in 1978, it was always a labor of love. "It was natural for me," The Hanover resident said. "I had always enjoyed being in athletics, and once I got into coaching, I really enjoyed working with young people, conveying what I know and then seeing them perform."

Frew retired from Delone at the end of the 2006-07 school year, but he hasn't entirely stepped away from Midstate high school football. This fall, he's been enjoying a new role as an analyst for Hanover radio station WHVR's weekly broadcast of York-Adams League games.

INDUCTED 2009

Jane Goss didn't spend her career worrying about glass ceilings. She was too busy looking for open doors, like the one that brought the young physical education teacher to Shippensburg University. Happily settled into a new job at Gettysburg High School, Elizabethtown native Goss was contacted in 1967 about an open field hockey coaching slot at Shippensburg. Mindful of the vastly more limited field of opportunities for women in intercollegiate athletics at that time, Goss talked it over with friends and mentors, and decided to take her shot. "I didn't think at that time the opportunities would come available that often." What followed was a marriage made in Red Raider heaven.

Goss arrived at Shippensburg that summer, a freshly minted member of the health and physical education department and head coach of the field hockey and women's tennis teams. That seemed a good fit. Goss had competed in field hockey and tennis in high school and later at West Chester, where she had earned her degree in health and physical education. But looking back, good seems an understatement.

By the time Goss was ready to relinquish her whistle, her teams had posted a sterling 16-year record of 111 wins, 46 losses and 21 ties, for a tidy winning percentage of .707, and made history in 1979 with Shippensburg's first-ever national title in any sport. The success came quickly, and it persisted. Starting at a time before regular conference play for women, and often finding only as few as eight opponents a year, Goss's Raiders cruised the state looking for matches, starting with a 20-game unbeaten streak that ran late into the 1969 season. They closed that year with a 2-1 victory over Penn State. Those years were really just a foretaste of things to come, as women's opportunities started to move into the modern era.

The undisputed high point was the national championship run in 1979, when Shippensburg posted a 16-2-3 record and won the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women Division III national title. The NCAA did not run a field hockey championship at that time. During the four-game AIAW tournament, Goss's gang allowed only one goal, and afterward Shippensburg's Dorothy Fichter was named Player of the Year by Field Hockey News magazine. Other doors were just about to open for Goss, however.

In the 1982-83 academic year she was tapped to succeed Gwen Baker as the university's director of women's athletics. One year later, Goss stepped back from her field hockey coaching to serve full-time as associate director of athletics. Goss retired from her university position in 2000, when she was inducted as an honorary member into the Shippensburg University Athletic Hall of Fame.

Always drawn to sports as an outlet for her energies, Goss is most pleased at the opportunities girls and boys have to play and grow these days. "I always enjoyed seeing young people - especially girls - participate and grow and develop in their sport," Goss said. "At the college level I always told them you're here first for an education, but that can only be broadened by participation in sports because you get this great training in leadership, discipline, organization and teamwork."

INDUCTED 2007

All three Dick Heckmans go into the South Central Sports Hall of Fame tonight: the player, the coach, and the administrator. Any one of them might have qualified on his own. But students and parents at James Buchanan High School are undoubtedly most grateful for the combination including:

• The two-time all Adams/Franklin County League basketball player in 1963 and 1964 who would become the first player at James Buchanan to break the 1,000 point career total.

• The coach who led his high school alma mater to three different league titles in two stints sandwiched around a phenomenally successful five year run at Broadfording Christian Academy in Maryland.

• The athletic director who, in 15 years at James Buchanan, has overseen multiple sports programs that taken together have combined for 30 Mid Penn Conference championships.

Growing up on a farm in rural Franklin County, Heckman's personal introduction to sports came through his father, a major New York Yankees fan who would get young Richard interested in Pony and Little League baseball. Heckman enjoyed baseball, too. (His three sons- Mickey, Bobby and Tony- are all named for Yankees!) But instead of developing into the next Mickey Mantle, Heckman made his sports name on the hardwood.

After his own stellar playing career, Heckman returned to James Buchanan as a Social Studies teacher and basketball coach in 1968, following his graduation from Shippensburg University. After capturing back-to-back league titles in 1973 and '74, Heckman's strong Christian faith led him to help found and lead two separate Christian high schools in Hagerstown, MD. (Broadfording) and Shalom (Chambersburg). At Broadfording, Heckman's 1977-78 boys basketball team won a Christian schools national championship.

By 1985, having accomplished some important personal goals and eager to coach his sons in a public school setting, Heckman returned to James Buchanan for a 12-year second tour highlighted by a spectacular 26-3 season in 1990-91.

Heckman ended his 25-year coaching career in 1997 with an overall record of 401-205, but he continued as athletic director through 2006 using sports as his tool to help young people prepare for life. "I certainly did not always do everything right," Heckman summed up, "but I hope in my 38 years of education that I was able to be a positive influence on many of the young people I had the privilege to teach, coach and lead."

INDUCTED 2009

Field hockey takes center stage at this year's induction ceremony, with three new Hall of Famers boasting a life's work in the sport. It is only fitting then that Bertie Landes, one of the most successful field hockey coaches to every walk Central Pennsylvania's fields, is among our honorees tonight.

Landes is still writing her personal record book but entering this fall her Lady Raiders' teams had posted a ten year cumulative record of 159-50-1, for a remarkable career winning percentage of .761.

Shippensburg has made it to the NCAA Division II Field Hockey "Final Four" three times already under Landes' tutelage and is knocking on the door for a fourth appearance with a team that's started 16-1 this year and been ranked in the nation's top 5 all season. The Lady Raiders have had 13 unique selections to All-American teams since 1999. As for Landes, she has won Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference Coach of the year honors in 1999, 2003, and 2005. That latter year, she was also named Division II Coach of the Year by womensfieldhockey.com.

But for Landes, it really is about team first, and one of her proudest accomplishments is that her program has become a reference standard for the rugged PSAC, with top three conference finishes in eight of her ten years, including first place finishes from 2003-5.

Off the field, Landes is just as proud of the work her players' have done as mentors to girls at the nearby Scotland School for Veterans Children or taking on fundraising challenges for other charities. 

That's all part of what makes coaching so exciting for Landes, even at this point in her career. "Preseason is so exciting for me, when you start with these 26 individuals, and you start to get them playing together and fighting together ... That's very gratifying as a coach," Landes said.

A native of Collegeville, Montgomery Count, Landes comes by her knowledge of high level field hockey honestly enough. As a stalwart player for Lock Haven University, Landes was part of a lockdown defense that posted 15 shutouts in 33 games, on the way to a cumulative record of 29-2-2. She went on to become a member of the US National Field Hockey Team, spending seven years as a defender for the national side on teams that toured Europe, Africa and South America before retiring in 1975.

Meanwhile, she was starting her own teaching and coaching career. Landes spent five years at East Pennsboro School District and two at Swarthmore College before embarking on a remarkable 19-year stint at Philadelphia Biblical University in Langhorne, where her teams posted a 179-55-21 record. A change in administration at PBU in 1999 caused Landes to seek out new opportunities and she found everything she wanted at Shippensburg, including - in the last four years – a long coveted shot to be a full-time field hockey coach.

Landes has found championships and contentment at Shippensburg, and fully expects to complete her career there. After a few more winning seasons, of course. "Once you've built a successful program, it's just neat to see the traditions continue," she said.

INDUCTED 2008

Before coaches like Jack Mull mold young baseball players into professionals, there have to be men like Paul "Pete" Lehigh, who literally bring the game to them as kids. They're the guys who make it a living, breathing sport that leaves dirt on your clothes and the smell of a leather glove lingering on your fingers. A game that's played in your town's ball fields; not just viewed through a television screen.

Lehigh, of Hanover, helped give that experience to literally thousands of boys in York and Adams counties in 37 years as a player, coach, and administrator of Teener, American Legion and local sandlot leagues. For that good work and devotion to his sport, he enters the Hall of Fame tonight. 

For Lehigh, sports were the best activity a boy could have in the 1940s and '50s, and he busied himself in high school as a three-sport athlete, playing football, wrestling and baseball. After school, Lehigh was mustered into the Army in 1953, but he found that the national pastime could travel with him even to Fort Richardson, Alaska. There, Lehigh became a member of an all-Alaska Command team that earned several trips to national service tournaments.

That experience left him looking for ways to continue in baseball when he returned to the Midstate in 1956, starting what would become a 38-year career as a railroader. Lehigh started playing and, eventually, coaching and managing through 1972 in three area sandlot leagues. And he didn't stop there. By the late 1960s, he was integral in starting up a new American Legion team in Spring Grove and in organizing a new Teener League for kids in the Hanover area.

Among the standout moments: when one of his young pitchers were in the Sports lllustrated's "Faces in the Crowd" feature for throwing three no-hitters in a single season; being named "Manager of the Year" in York's Central League for a worst to second place turnaround season; and taking his Hanover Teener team to the state finals in 1971. 

Whatever Lehigh gave to baseball, he figures the sport has returned in spades. His wife Hazel was at his side for all games, his designated scorekeeper. And for both Lehighs, who have no children of their own, the involvement with youth was a way to have a positive influence on thousands of kids. "I enjoyed helping and teaching, and my wife was involved and that made it all that much better," said Lehigh, who is still a regular fixture around Legion games in Hanover. 

Off the field, Lehigh has been just as active in his church, veterans and other civic organizations, from directing local Hoop Shoot competitions to volunteering on three separate Hurricane Katrina relief missions. Going into the Hall, he says, is an honor that he never expected. But for a guy who always appreciated the people that sports brought his way, let's just say congrats on making the team.

INDUCTED 2008

South Central Pennsylvania has been home to its fair share of baseball pros over the decades. But not many have worked in the sport as a professional for as long or in as many places as Chambersburg's Jack Mull. A true baseball lifer and lover, Mull retired in 2006 after 38 years as a player, coach, manager and personnel man, eventually touching all levels of the game.

Mull's long road trip began after he lettered in football, basketball and baseball for Chambersburg High School, graduating in 1962 with recognition as the South Penn League's All-Star catcher. Mull joined the Navy after graduation, where he not only beefed up his 165-pound frame but also quickly drew notice on various service teams, eventually playing in national tournaments where he drew the eye of professional scouts. Upon discharge, he signed with the Chicago Cubs and went on to spend five years in their farm system starting with the Quincy Gems in the Midwest League.

Mull's best year and worst luck as a player came in 1970, when he was All Star catcher in the Class AA Texas League, and earned a call-up to the Cubs when starting catcher Randy Hundley was injured. But Mull couldn't report because he was nursing his own bout of shoulder soreness at the time. Before the 1974 season, the Cubs offered him a managing position, which he accepted, leading their Gulf Coast League affiliate to a Rookie League championship. The San Francisco Giants offered Mull a Class AAA playing contract for 1975, and he spent two years at Phoenix in the Pacific Coast League before retiring as a player for good.

From 1977 through 1994, Jack continued working in the Giants organization. When he wasn't managing, he was coaching, and the spent the 1985 season on San Francisco's big league staff as bullpen coach. Mull capped his career with 12 years with the Cleveland Indians organization.

In 20 years as a manager, five of Mull's teams had their league's best record, and two won league championships. He was also selected "Manager of the Year" three times. "Managing and coaching in the minor leagues, it wasn't so much about winning as it was keeping your patience and keeping everybody focused on the job at hand ... You've got to keep trying and see where it takes you. I think that's what I tried to instill in the kids I coached along the way," he said.

Mull, who maintained his off-season home in Chambersburg throughout his career - "We've never found a place that we liked as much as South Central PA," he says -retired in 2006 after three seasons with the Indians affiliate in Eastlake, Ohio to spend more time with family and friends. And, it should come as no surprise, to watch baseball.

INDUCTED 2010

It was all those years of playing catcher that made him good. So says longtime softball umpire James A. "Junie" Noel, inducted tonight for his decades of contributions as one of those who kept the games organized and fair for thousands of players of all shapes and sizes over the last 50 years.

Noel had grown up an avid ball player himself in New Oxford, but had to give up the game as a player around 1960 when he was bothered by painful bone chips in his elbow and didn't have the health insurance to do anything about it. But he quickly found a new hobby that would keep him close to the game for a lifetime, umpiring.

The local leagues at the time were always sorely in need of umpires, Noel recalled in a recent interview, and "Since I had seen balls and strikes all my life as a catcher, I figured I could do a half-decent job of it." What he might not have counted on was how his new hobby would soon keep him as busy as any baseball lifer. Noel umped all levels of play for the Amateur Softball Association for 45 years - including four different national championship tournaments in the 1970' s; 25 years with the area's high school softball leagues; and 10 seasons at the collegiate level.

Among his career highlights, Noel called three no-hitters, and he called games for Eddie Feigner, the famous "King and his Court" barnstormer who threw softballs faster than any major league pitcher had ever thrown a baseball. And just to ease himself into the winter off-seasons, we guess, he added 25 years as a high school football official, too. 

In addition to his work on the field, Noel has been recognized for doing nearly as much behind the scenes to upgrade the quality of the umpiring in softball, helping to organize and administer several regional umpiring associations. 

In 1994, he was inducted into the Pennsylvania State Softball Hall of Fame for all his works, even though he would keep on making the right calls for another 10 years before retiring in 2004. "It was the challenge of the game" that kept him going into his 70's, Noel said, referring to the art of anticipating the action and making sure that he was always in the right position to make the call on the bang-bang play about to take place.

Now at the tender age of 80, Noel, a retired manufacturing plant supervisor, has hung up his chest protector for good. Living in Hanover with his wife Jean, he still remains active with daily workouts at the local YMCA.

INDUCTED 2008

Dara Torres, the 41-year-old swimmer who shattered age barriers in the pool at this year's Olympic Games, has nothing on Richard Ocker, who decided he wanted to run sprints in a serious way about the time people qualify for the AARP, and seemingly keeps getting better with age.

Ocker had always been a strong runner, from the days when as a charter member of the Boiling Springs High School track team he trained in farmer's fields surrounding his home and won the conference mile championship in his senior year. Or, when he broke the mile record at Shippensburg University.

But in Ocker's case, it's the accomplishments registered at ages when most men consider a walk around an 18-hole golf course a work-out that have made him something of an age-defying marvel.

To be sure, Ocker never really stopped running after his stint in the late 1950s on a men's' track team at Shippensburg that never lost a dual meet. There was always, he remembers, a next road race to train for. And he had also gotten heavily involved in coaching distance runners at Dickinson College.

But Ocker, by the mid- 1980s, was just as involved in a myriad of other professional and civic activities, as an elementary school principal and newly elected Carlisle Borough councilman. It was getting increasingly difficult for him to squeeze his own long training runs into an ever-crowed schedule. When he was returned to Dickinson's track staff, after a temporary break, as a sprint coach in the late 1980s, he started working out with those athletes and came to realize that a sprinter's workout regimen would fit considerably better into his busy schedule. The results have been remarkable:

· Ocker, until this past summer, had won seven straight 100-meter dash titles at the Pennsylvania Senior Games, and he now holds meet records for the 100 in the 60-64, 65-69, and 70-74 age groups.

· He has qualified 15 years in a row for the master's100meter race at Philadelphia's storied Penn Relays.

· And in competing in the 100 at the World Masters Championships in Edmonton, Alberta in 2005 against other men aged 65-69, Ocker won his preliminary and semi-final heats, only to tear a muscle in the finals.

He is still running, to be sure, but that's not all the retired educator does at the track. Ocker is still helping to coach men's and women's sprinters at Dickinson, where he has coached in a volunteer or staff capacity for more than 30 years. It is, he believes, his favorite outlet, because he gets to enjoy that teacher's impact again. "When one of your own kids wins, there's no comparison," the Carlisle resident said. "It's so much more exciting. I've always been around kids and athletes, and I'm just happy to see them perform well."

Now that he's a Hall of Famer, does Ocker plan to quit anytime soon? "I don't ever plan to retire from running," he said, making the case that this passion is his own personal fountain of youth. "So many people think aging gracefully is entirely hereditary, and it is not. I think your lifestyle outweighs heredity by quite a bit." Ocker credits his continued success to a lifetime of fitness, training hard but smart as he gets older, eating right and avoiding alcohol and tobacco. "I've just been active for so long that I can't imagine being inactive."

INDUCTED 2008

Steve Oldt's path to the South Central Hall of Fame is a little different than that of the typical honoree: It began in a bank office. Oldt, just discharged from the Army and starting a career in civilian life, was recruited from work by one of his customers, then-Cardinals coach Harry Hopple. "He just looked at me and said: 'You're a big kid. You ought to be playing football,"' Oldt recalls.

Oldt, who hadn't played organized sports since junior high, took the invitation, and launched what would be a stellar, if a little belated, football career. After a brief stint at defensive end, Oldt became a bulwark for the offensive lines of a series of great Cardinal teams, including two undefeated regular seasons, and one national minor league championship in 1979. Oldt, during that run, won numerous offensive line MVP awards both at guard and center, and in 1978 was selected to the International Football League's all-league team at center.

Oldt stopped playing football after the 1979 championship season, but he didn't stop his involvement in sports. He immediately began helping the football staff at Chambersburg schools, eventually becoming an advance scout for the program from 1986 through 2006. And Oldt also found a new passion for his own still-burning competitive fires: rugby. 

He joined with a group of friends to form a Chambersburg club, playing well into his 40s in a game where even an old lineman could carry the ball. Since turning 50 in 1992, he has played with the Middle Age Rugby Side out of Philadelphia, a traveling team that has played in tourneys all over the

world.

Oldt retired last December as executive vice president and chief operating officer for Orrstown Bank, and he continues to serve as an elected supervisor in Shippensburg Twp. Already an inductee to the American Football Association's Minor League Hall of Fame, he considers himself "one of the lucky ones" tonight, noting his participation in sports has already enriched his life with irreplaceable friendships and experiences. "It's the people that you meet, and the friendships that you make," Oldt says. "That's what it's all about.

INDUCTED 2010

There are lots of football coaches who contributed to just-retired Shippensburg University head coach William "Rocky" Rees' success. Specifically, all those who couldn't beat his teams. Through October, in 26 years as head man at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove and Shippensburg University, Rees' squads amassed a cumulative record of 157-125-2. To the consistent victors go the spoils. For Rees, tonight, that means induction into the South Central Chapter of the PA Sports Hall of Fame.

The very definition of a football lifer, Rees enjoyed his own successful playing career as a New Jersey schoolboy and, later, as a star running back at West Chester University from 1968-70. Fleeting NFL dreams ended with a knee injury at a New England Patriots rookie camp. But not the football life.

Quite by chance, Rees landed a job as a graduate assistant/dorm advisor at West Chester in 1971, before launching a teaching and coaching career at Newark, Delaware the next year. After a hugely successful run as head coach there in which his team won 28 games from 1974-76, Rees moved to college jobs at Bucknell (1977-82) and Colgate (1983-84).

In 1985, he became head coach at Susquehanna, where he led the Crusaders to three Middle Atlantic Conference championships in five seasons, plus a berth in the 1986 NCAA Division Ill national championship game. In 1990, Rees took his current post, quickly establishing Shippensburg as a consistently competitive program in the tough Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference. After capturing an outright conference championship in 2009, Rees announced this summer he would leave "The Ship" after this year. He goes out with a career mark of 121-110-1 and four PSAC Coach-of-the-Year prizes.

But in many ways, the real wins for this coach will continue for years. As much of a narcotic as the Saturday afternoon games can be, Rees said recently, the nobility of coaching boils down to building relationships and making impacts on kids. "When you see these guys come back years later and they're doing well, they are fathers, they're doing well in business, that's the real thrill of being a coach," Rees said recently. If you witnessed the heart-felt send-off on October 30th after Rees coached his last game at Shippensburg's Seth Grove Stadium - a win complete with Gatorade bath, post-game tribute by the marching band, and players chanting "Rocky, Rocky" through it all - you'd know that's not coach-speak.

Rees, a widowed father of one, plans to stay in the area in his retirement. He does not rule out a future return to the game he loves but vows, for 2011 at least, to just enjoy being a fan. "I've never been a spectator," Rees, 61, said. "I'd like to tailgate and see what a football game looks like from the people's point of view."

INDUCTED 2010

Whatever it is that draws us to games, Gerry Steger went back for second helpings. What else but a pure love for sports and the inherent thrill of competition to explain an accomplished educator's 50-year interest, still very much alive, in officiating local track meets, volleyball matches, football and basketball games. "I enjoyed it." Steger said recently about his life as an official. "I like being a part of the game, I enjoy the camaraderie with the other officials and .... you actually do a lot of competing against yourself, to see if you can call the perfect game."

Steger, who retired in 1993 as curriculum director for Big Spring School District, didn't need anything to keep him in the game as a youth. Growing up in Chambersburg, he was a talented three-sport athlete on some very successful Chambersburg High School teams. His favorite sport growing up was basketball, and he was a major part of a Trojans team that won a string of South Penn Conference titles and capped off its 1951 season -Steger' s senior year-with a PIAA District III tournament championship. Steger was also starting quarterback of the Trojans football team in his junior and senior years, helping guide Chambersburg to a South Penn Football Championship in 1949. And, for good measure, he ran sprints and jumped for the track team.

Steger parlayed his basketball skills into grants and aid to help him enroll at Dickinson College, but eventually transferred to Lebanon Valley College, where he contributed to a Mid-Atlantic Conference champion team in his junior year. He was the team's captain and leading scorer as a senior. He wasn't done with school or sports yet. In fact, he was just getting started. 

Starting out on a teaching career, Steger immediately jumped into coaching, holding a variety of different posts through the late 1950s and '60s, including brief stints as varsity basketball coach at Central Dauphin, Spring-Ford and Mechanicsburg high schools. It was around this time that he also started working in the fall as a football official.

Eventually, as Steger moved into public schools’ administration, where in most districts coaching is no longer permitted, officiating would become his number one avocation. "It filled in very nicely. I enjoyed it, and I didn't miss the coaching as a result," Steger said. So, if you attended any area high school or collegiate football games, basketball games or track meets in the last 40 years, chances are good you saw Steger at work. If your partisan flames run high, you might have even yelled at him, though Steger insists his focus on the game at hand is such that he wouldn't have heard you anyway.

About 10 years ago, Steger gave up football and basketball - too hard on an older man's legs, he says. But he is still a fixture at many area track meets and invitationals as a rock steady starter, and has also been a regular volleyball official since 1993. For his dedication as one of the area's true unsung heroes, working to keep things fair and literally on a level playing field for all, Steger, who lives in Mechanicsburg with his wife, Diane, is welcomed into the Hall of Fame tonight.

INDUCTED 2011

Howard Strawmyre becomes a hall of famer tonight, but he was already a "founding father." Ask any of the athletic trainers who are already in the South Central Sports Hall of Fame, or any former athletes or coaches of a certain age from Chambersburg High School or Shippensburg University. They can all tell you tales about the resourceful, innovative ways that Strawmyre introduced and advanced the profession of sports medicine in South Central Pennsylvania.

For example, at Chambersburg High in the early l 960s, Strawmyre created one of the first off-season strength and conditioning programs in the area. Because there was no funding for a formal weight room, Strawmyre made do with improvised equipment like cinder blocks and ladies’ pantyhose filled with sand. Strawmyre saw early on that the off-season work didn't just build stronger athletes: it conditioned them for the heavy workload and stresses of the season to come. It was a Strawmyre mantra: "Prevention is better than rehab."

And you all know how conscious trainers, coaches, athletes and parents are about heat stroke and dehydration now. Well, even fifty years ago, one Howie Strawmyre was checking daily temperatures and humidity levels so the coaches at Chambersburg could schedule their practices with safety and comfort in mind. He even developed his own precursor to Gatorade, known as "Texas Tea." Strawmyre still has the recipe: Take a five-gallon jug, mix a half-gallon of concentrated fruit juice, three large packs of the same flavor of Kool-Aid, a handful of salt, and enough water and ice to fill. "Try it. You will like it, and it will prevent electrolyte depletion," he guarantees.

Strawmyre came upon these notions by avidly attending clinics and courses during summers off from his life as a biology teacher, and soaking up all knowledge he could from Chambersburg physicians Robert Wingerd and Robert Richards, the school doctors at the time. They were his mentors - as Strawmyre stresses to anyone he meets - taking the one-time railroad mechanic who only went to college because of GI benefits he'd earned through Navy service in World War II and helping him to find the best programs and courses to hone his skills.

An Altoona native, Strawmyre graduated from Shippensburg University in 1950, and started his career as a biology and driver's education teacher at Shippensburg High School. He moved to Chambersburg High School in 1957, and then became the school's first head trainer in 1962. He would hold the position through 1985, when he retired and was scooped up for another 10-year stint as an assistant at Shippensburg University.

One wonders if Strawmyre, this self-made professional, realized along the way just how much respect he was earning from those around him. In 1964, for example, he was asked by then Patriot-News sports editor Al Clark to serve as a trainer for the Texas All-Stars at the new "Big 33" football classic, Strawmyre would return to the Big 33 as head trainer through 1985.

He has been named a "founding father" of the profession by the Pennsylvania Athletic Trainers Society.

And listen to this testimonial from next-generation trainer Steve Heckler, who extended Strawmyre's career as Shippensburg's director of sports medicine in 1986. "I may have been educated in a more modern time," Heckler recalled, "but I still marvel at all the skills and techniques Strawmyre taught us all." 

The way Strawmyre sees it, of course, he just did the best he could with the resources available. He says being open-minded about new ideas and never losing his desire to learn were the keys to his success. "It has been a very rewarding career, and it helped me an awful lot," Strawmyre said.

Now 92, Strawmyre lives in Shippensburg, He is proud to have been part of the broad march forward that the field of sports medicine has taken over the past 50 years, and believes the athletes, the fans and the games themselves are better served because of it.

INDUCTED 2010

If anyone ever wanted to field an offensive line for the ages out of South Central Pennsylvania, Walt Whitehead would be a good foundation. That's exactly the role he played in the 1960s as a road-grading tackle for one of the best football eras ever at Carlisle High School. In 1963, 1964, and 1965,

under the tutelage of his father and head coach, John Whitehead, the Thundering Herd rolled to a cumulative 28-2-1 record, playing as an independent just before formation of the old South Central League.

One of several Herd players from that era to get looks from big-time college programs, Whitehead - who had also been selected to play in the Big 33 high school all-star game - took his talents to Purdue University, playing Big Ten ball at the apex of the Woody Hayes/Bo Schembechler era. In his freshman year Purdue, led by quarterback Bob Griese, would win the Big Ten and Rose Bowl. 

Over the next three years, Whitehead, who had transitioned from tackle to center, more than held his own in a collegiate career that included blasting holes for All-American running back Leroy Keyes and contributing to a conference co-championship in 1967. Whitehead was a second team all-conference selection in 1969, won selection to the North-South Shrine and Hula Bowl senior all-star games, and even fielded an offer from the Cincinnati Bengals after his senior season. 

But the pragmatic son of a coach was already looking forward to the next phase of a life in football that it sometimes seemed Whitehead had been born into. "I wasn't that big, and I wasn't that good," Whitehead said recently. But quite apart from that, he had actually been thinking about a coaching career since a two-week stint between high school graduation and reporting to college where his dad asked him to help George Bowen and Jim Bowers with the Carlisle junior varsity team. "I loved every minute of it, and that's why I knew coaching was what I wanted to do."

And coach he did. After a year as a graduate assistant at Purdue, Whitehead started to carve out his own career with a series of brief, but successful high school stops before joining his dad on the staff at Lehigh University, where Whitehead would stay from 1976 through 1987, holding a variety of defensive positions in what was year-in, year-out one of the most successful Division I-AA programs in the East.  By 1990, Whitehead had joined the staff at the school that would be the other polestar in his coaching career, Wheaton College in Naperville, IL. For the 14 seasons - sandwiched around some brief stints at the helm of Carlisle High in the mid-1990s, Concordia University in Nebraska, and California, PA. - Whitehead helped Wheaton stay consistently at the top of the NCAA Division Ill rankings, and send several players to the pros.

Whitehead retired with his wife Melissa to Beaufort, SC, after the 2009-10 school year, and is not working for a team for the first time in 40 years. So, what's he doing with his new-found free time? Believe it or not, he's picked up the whistle as a high school official and he is, he said, having a blast.

Tonight, Whitehead joins his late father - not to mention several teammates from their personal golden years at Carlisle - in the South Central Chapter of the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame. It's an honor he says he treasures, and a reward that Whitehead said will rank right alongside all the life lessons learned from a career of associations through football with wonderful classmates, coaches, colleagues and students. Congratulations to a son and father that, in a relatively short period, left a larger than life stamp on Carlisle.

INDUCTED 2009

Bob Wood's sporting career reminds one a little bit of Superman. To most people at Shippensburg University in the late 1970s, he might as well have been Clark Kent. Or in Wood's case, an unassuming business student. But at the Heiges Field House pool, a super-hero alter ego took over, allowing Wood to soar, spin and somersault to greatness as the Red Raiders' leading male diving champion of all-time. Wood is inducted tonight for those times when he, figuratively speaking, wore Superman's cape, flying to All American status as a collegiate diver, including a state championship in his senior year in both the one-meter and three-meter boards.

Wood wasn't always single-minded in his pursuit of springboard excellence. As a boy growing up in Carlisle, he was active in all kinds of sports through school and at the Carlisle YMCA, where he and a few other boys first discovered their abilities and passion for gymnastics, and Wood was active in age-group swimming. By high school, Wood was playing football and pole vaulting for the track team, but it was through individual training on trampolines and in the pool where he was really refining his little-noted specialty in diving.

By his senior year, Wood finished second at the state YMCA championships. Already having received specialized coaching from a diver at Shippensburg University, Wood was recruited to Ship by longtime swimming and diving coach Donnie Miller. "In football, I was average. In track, I was average," Wood recalled recently. "But in diving, what I was able to do was unique." Wood met with almost immediate success at Shippensburg, qualifying for the NCAA championships as a freshman.

But it was after his sophomore season, Wood recalls, when he really began pushing himself in the weight room, on trampolines in the gym, and at the pool in a quest to make sure the potential was fully tapped. It's that dedication, Wood explained, that makes all those gravity-defying twists, flips and turns look so effortless. Far from being worried about banging into the board or subjective scoring, Wood's goal became to perform his dives so technically perfect that judges would have to award him top scores. "It truly is technique, and it's drive and it's practice," said Wood, now the chief executive officer of John H. Myers & Son, a York-based building products company. It paid off.

In his senior season, Wood won Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference championships, and went on to contend for the national crowns, placing 7th in both the one-meter and three-meter competitions. His point records at the Heiges Field House pool still stand. 

Wood hasn't dived competitively since college, though he did coach the divers at Western Kentucky while pursuing his master's in business administration and followed that up with some coaching at Dickinson College. But he believes the work ethic and drive he learned from those years in the pool definitely still provide benefits today both professionally and in his community activities. "I do believe that when you have that benefit of having that kind of success at something, it gives you a level of self-confidence that you can do just about anything you set your heart to," Wood said. "I think that's a real valuable part of being involved in athletics."