Maybe it should have been re-named “Highlands Day” at the December induction for the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame.
“As well it should,” opined longtime Highlands coach, teacher, parent and grandparent Skip Hicks, with a wink of an eye and a grin as three of the four new inductees were Bluebirds.
But let’s start with the lone outsider, Vance Wiegand, owner of Covington’s Egelston-Maynard Sporting Goods and an Aurora, Ind., native and Ball State alum when he arrived in Northern Kentucky 42 years ago.
“I didn’t know a person,” Vance said, thanking “those early customers who trusted me… they allowed me to build a business and a home… a family business” with his wife, daughter and son all sharing in the work at the familiar Madison Avenue location.
The tagline for Egelston-Maynard is “We’ve got what it takes to play the game” as it became a reliable partner in moving into the team business thanks to its participation in Sports. Inc’s shared buying agreement that allows small businesses to compete big.
“But it never gets old seeing the smile on the face of someone getting their first baseball glove or a letter jacket with their name on it,” Vance says. “I’m proud to have had more than four decades serving Northern Kentucky sports.”
Glenn Schmidt Jr. is a name you can’t have missed if you’ve ever driven through downtown Newport where the 1959 Highlands grad followed his father and grandfather (“They were in the nightclub business,” he says, in something of an understatement about the family’s Beverly Hills and Glen Rendezvous establishments). Glenn went into bowling and became an entrepreneur and pioneer in youth and high school bowling in a business he’s been in “for 56 years now,” he says, noting that he started at the age of eight in 1949 when his dad included bowling lanes in the Glenn Schmidt Playtorium the family was building.
Owner and operator of four lanes (also East Bowl in Batesville, Ind., Holly Lanes in Amelia and La-Ru Lanes in Highland Heights), past president of both the Greater Cincinnati and Kentucky BPA and a member of both the Cincinnati and Ohio Bowling Halls of Fame, the 1964 UK grad is most proud of his efforts to encourage youth bowling and get bowling recognized as a high school sport by the KHSAA in Kentucky.
“Youth bowling has been one of my favorite things to do,” Glenn says, “But high school bowling is a part I deeply loved.” So in 2000, he started working with three Louisville owners to do something about it and “came up with a plan.” By the next year, there were five high school bowling teams here in Northern Kentucky, then 20 to 25, and by 2011, the KHSAA recognized the sport, and authorized a state tournament.
And they hired Glenn, who told them he didn’t want to get paid, to help them conduct it. When they told him they couldn’t hire him if he didn’t take some pay, Glenn agreed — to talk about it anyway. His longtime associate, fellow Hall of Famer now and a terrific bowler and owner of Southern Lanes in Alexandria, Don Hilker Jr., introduced Glenn and thanked him for “growing the game the right way.”
The numbers for Todd Clements are hard to believe. His varsity tennis career at Highlands started in the fifth grade. That’s right, the fifth grade. The 1980 state champ for Highlands, the school’s lone state tennis title in the history of the state tournament that began in 1960, should have been no surprise. Todd was 86-9 in the regular season in his career, 15-1 in regional play and 7-2 downstate in singles. That’s an overall mark of 108-12 for Todd, who went on to become a scholarship athlete at Eastern Kentucky where he earned honorable mention All-American honors in 1983.
Todd thanked his parents for getting him started in tennis at the age of eight, much like Glenn Schmidt Jr., and he could see why, he said. “What my parents liked was that it was all local,” he said of those early tournament years. And his family for supporting his love of the game.
He was certainly in the right place for it, thanking “the city of Fort Thomas for having the best facilities and Coach (Kenney) Shields for steering me in the right direction” after he tried out for basketball at Highlands.
Speaking of Coach Shields, the vice-president of the NKSHOF, made the point next that “good statisticians are hard to find,” Which is why he and the rest of the Highlands’ coaches were thrilled when they look back at the day when an eighth-grader by the name of Dan Hamberg showed up with his dad asking if they needed a stat person.
Forty-eight years later and 64 seasons for four different sports, Dan is still at it. Some future goals, he says: “Making it to 50 years and seeing us get to our 1,000th win,” Dan says, “and maybe another state championship, which would be icing on the cake,” he deadpans, “pun intended” for the “cake-eaters” as the teams from upscale Fort Thomas have heard themselves called forever.
As for getting to 1,000 wins, Highlands needs 47 with 953 now, good for a spot in the Top Five high school programs in the nation, Dan says, behind 1-2 Valdosta, Ga., and Louisville Male.
Having done 25 years of football, 23 years of boys’ basketball, six years of girls’ basketball and five years of baseball, Dan is a lifesaver for media working Highlands’ games when he has totals almost instantaneously at the final gun. And he’s right there down on the field before you do your postgame interviews.
“Hambone” or “Hammy” as he was nicknamed by Coach Shields, recalls a time when they were giving an award to “Dan Hamberg” at Highlands. “Nobody knew who that was,” he says. The nicknames had stuck. As has Dan, who can recall the first game he ever did, “a freshman game for Coach Mike Listerman.” And when doing all the different sports was a bit much for him, he recalls getting offered $10 a game for his services to stay on with one of them.
“I wished I’d kept more of the numbers like the games I’ve worked and the won-loss totals, things like that,” Dan says. But he can tell you the one time he made money doing stats. “Highlands was in a football game on ESPN and they paid me $125. I took a photo of the check.”
And now he has a Hall of Fame plaque to go with that photo.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X @dweber3440.