There were all the traditional sports — football, basketball and baseball — represented in the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame’s first inductions for 2026 this week at the Gardens of Park Hills.
And a longshot – trapshooting.
There were big schools – some of the biggest – and small schools – from Penn State on one end to St. Pius Grade School at the other.
And a surprise special guest who made the large crowd glad they showed up.
Matthew Bosch got things going and the St. Pius baseball/softball/volleyball announcer made it clear why “I’ve been doing this for 15 years now,” starting out as the first person to do fifth-grade girls’ volleyball games.
Matthew, a Covington Catholic grad, has people ask him why he volunteers his time and is still doing so. “I tell them the best seat in the house is always free.”
When Notre Dame Academy came calling for him to do their games, too, he drove a hard bargain, getting them to offer to double his contract, he said with a laugh. “Two times zero is still zero.” So it’s clearly not the money. Matthew is an example of how the NKSHOF isn’t just for the star players and coaches, said Pres. Randy Marsh, but for everybody who makes sports go in Northern Kentucky.
Dennis Menning was the trapshooter and the Newport Central Catholic alum teared up a bit in an emotional thank you to the crowd that included a large contingent of friends and family. He and his wife, Sharon, got their shooting start at the Bob White Sportsman’s Club six years after Dennis graduated from high school and the sport has carried them to many states as competitors and coaches.
It’s also had him start Kentucky’s scholastic shooting program that has seen him – actually Dennis and his wife – coach more than 2,000 young shooters now. That’s “our part,” says Dennis, who makes it clear they’re operating as a team, but who also has a career-best competitive moment that saw him take high gun in the 2015 Southern Grand Nationals with 97 out of 100 targets from the 23-yard line.
After winning trophies in Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida and North Carolina, and serving as Kentucky state director for 14 years for the scholastic program, Dennis says “I’ll continue to coach as long as I can.” And preach the value of “sportsmanship and integrity” to the young shooters he and his wife are mentoring.
Matthew Berger — yes, from one of Northern Kentucky’s most renowned athletic families — was a first-team all-state soccer player at CovCath. And that wasn’t even his main sport. Baseball was. He played Connie Mack Baseball, earning World Series MVP honors after an almost impossible .792 batting average with a mathematically impossible slugging percentage of 1.127.
All a result, Matt said, of adhering to the maxim that “if it takes 10,000 hours to master something,” which might be the number of hours he and his dad spent feeding baseballs into the pitching machine in the batting cage. The result? Matt became the first freshman at the University of Louisville to be named All-American in baseball.
Matt finished his CovCath career with the most home runs in school history and even on Wednesday evening at the school’s own Athletic Hall of Fame ceremonies, they were still talking about Matt’s game-winning home run launch over a house in a win against Harrison County when they mistakenly pitched to Matt. And he would go on to become the Louisville career record-holder as well.
While Matt is “no longer a Northern Kentucky resident,” he says, “this is a great place to learn how to do all the right things.” Like hit lots of home runs a very long way.
Harry “Stretch” Clark earned that nickname, he said, when he was just two. So the surprise seeing him today is that he’s guard-sized – make that shooting guard, if you please. His career took him through a couple of culture change scenarios – from the suburb of Fort Mitchell in 1967 with all teammates who looked like him to inner-city Louisville and a Sullivan Business College program that won a couple of small college national championships while also playing all the big school freshman teams as “the team’s only white player,” Harry says.
A four-sport athlete at Beechwood and basketball MVP, Harry didn’t think he was good enough to play for schools like Xavier and Davidson, that sent him letters, he says. But he knew he could shoot it. Although “with so many guys I played with here, I can’t tell any lies today.” He did score 42 points in a freshman game and then on transferring back to Thomas More to play for Jim Weyer, he earned freshman MVP honors. Lloyd’s Jon Long, against whom he’d scored 30 points in a high school game, texted him Wednesday that “Man, you could shoot it . . . but your defense was a little suspect.”
But after spending much time and energy trying to earn his dad’s attention with his athletic accomplishments, Clark says he’s most proud of how his two sons were both Eagle scouts. And you can’t always win, he realized, on a day when as a wine merchant asked to speak to a group of 300 pilots’ wives, he was told that he would speak second. Speaking first? Astronaut Neal Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.
But he got lucky, Clark says, when asked to fill in for a basketball coaching assignment his sister felt she couldn’t handle. “I fell in love with the kids at the Sixth District School (in Covington),” he says. And years later, would run into girls he coached and helped on to high school basketball.
Pat Pidgeon is that rarest of all athletes – a Northern Kentucky football player who went on to play for and earn a scholarship at Penn State. It was something he’d always set his heart on, says Pidgeon, a native of the small town of Mayfield in northeastern Pennsylvania, whose dad, a former football player at Penn, came to Hebron as a pilot for Delta, and brought his family with him.
But thanks to eight shoulder dislocations, Pat’s football career as an athletic wide receiver/defensive back didn’t happen, although he would stay in the game as a Conner High punter. As for college, “TMU and UC had no interest in me as a walk-on” so he went back to Pennsylvania and walked-on at Penn State, where he recalls how “Joe Paterno grabbed me and said they’d give me two weeks . . . two days later, he said we’re going to keep you.”
After winning the job over the incumbent punter, Pat would go on to play in the Outback Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, the Citrus Bowl and the Alamo Bowl for the Nittany Lions as an honorable mention All-Big Ten punter who by 1999 was the No. 2 all-time career punter at Penn State. The good news. bad news story of that Outback Bowl was that the opponent was Kentucky and Pat had to come up with 26 tickets – 14 of them for friends and family in Kentucky.
And while his NFL signing “with Buffalo didn’t work out,” he says, Pidgeon and his wife, Tammy, who met here in the ninth grade, came back to Northern Kentucky and started a family that numbers four children. And he connected with his Conner coach Tom Stellman and began a career coaching numerous sports before becoming the A.D. at Ballyshannon Middle School.
Dave Scheibly played basketball well enough at Bishop Brossart to earn a scholarship to Meridian Junior College. And his 23 years refereeing high school basketball were good enough for him to earn two different assignments to the Sweet 16.
But golf was Dave’s game. Only not because he qualified for nationals in college. Or won the Kentucky Senior Open in 2016. It was all the friends he’s made along the way. Like the special guest who showed up to talk about him Wednesday. “Dave just appeared in my life,” said his good buddy, Triple Crown-winning and Hall of Fame jockey Steve Cauthen from Walton and other places — from New York to LA to Newmarket, UK. “He knows everybody.”
And when Dave got a call 20 years ago to join a celebrity golf foursome in 95-degree heat, he was smart enough to ask who they were and say yes when the other three turned out to be Marty Brennaman, Reds’ pitcher Chris Welsh and Cauthen. “Dave’s like me,” Cauthen said, “family is important to him the way it is to me.” As is his Yorkie, who Scheibly brings with him on his golf cart, another reason to like him, Cauthen said.
“I don’t know what else to say about him, he’s a great guy—honest, normal – sports has been an avenue to meet some fabulous people,” Cauthen said. Says Dave, “People see Steve as a legend, I see him as a friend.”
One of the ways they’ve bonded is that both were pushed and inspired from a young age by their dads, Steve said. Dave recalled how his dad would have him shoot 40 free throws to end his daily workout with a requirement he hit the last 10 straight – or go back to 1 and start over. “Now that’s pressure,” Dave said.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X @dweber3440.