With this week’s announcement of the 12-person Kentucky High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame class, it marks the second straight year that no Northern Kentuckian has joined the now 529 members enshrined in Kentucky’s most honored place for high school sports.
And as might be expected, there were four from Louisville (five if you count Ft. Knox) and two more from Lexington in the 2025 class. But none from Northern Kentucky? For two years straight?
Which is why we checked out the numbers. Just how many Northern Kentuckians have been selected for the KHSAA’s Hall of Fame since its creation in 1988?
That number would be 36, which would be not quite seven percent of the total. Considering that Northern Kentucky makes up right around 10 percent of Kentucky’s population of 4.58 million and considering Northern Kentucky’s rich sporting tradition, that 10 percent would be the absolute bare minimum.
We’re either getting short-changed here – or we’re short-changing ourselves.
It’s not always a case of the folks downstate looking the other way, as I discovered a long time ago in researching how it was that Northern Kentucky University came along something like a half-century later – and in a number of cases, even more — than Kentucky’s other public regional universities – Eastern, Western, Morehead, Murray and Kentucky State.
Turns out, while those downstate communities clamored for a state college through most of the years when the Legislature was creating them, Northern Kentucky didn’t seem to much care about hosting a state school with our access to the higher educational institutions in Cincinnati. Often, we didn’t bother to nominate any location when the time came. Often, we didn’t get in the higher education game.
Just wondering if that’s part of what’s going on here but doubt that’s the entire case. Maybe we just don’t care as much as the rest of the state that there are only 36 Northern Kentuckian Hall of Famers.
Here they are starting with Homer Rice, the lone local person in the first class of 27 in 1988 (with 11 from Louisville and Lexington); then in order, Donna Murphy (Newport);
The high-water mark came on that last group of five, all inducted in 2023 – NewCath’s Top 50 NBA all-time player Cowens, teammates Lorenzen and Smith out of Highlands, and coaches Goble out of Lloyd and Reese from Ludlow. Maybe that’s why no Northern Kentuckians were named the next two years.
A great list, obviously, but just a start. If we need something like more than a dozen just to get even with our population numbers, again at a bare minimum, we can turn to Charlie Coleman’s just published book – Northern Kentucky Sports Legends of the 1950s – and easily find a couple d of dozen there – and that’s just from the 1950s.
How about, in alphabetical order: Ludlow’s Jack Aynes, Holmes’ Bob Barton, Dayton’s Jim Boothe, Dixie Heights’ Dave Browning, Hebron’s John Crigler, Boone County’s Irv Goode, Bellevue’s Steele Harmon and Will Hundemer, Lloyd’s Jeoff Long, Beechwood’s Edgar McNabb, Holmes/Highlands/Newport’s Mike Murphy, Williamstown’s Arnie Risen, St. Henry’s Pat Scott, Dixie’s Howard Stacy, Newport Central Catholic’s Larry Staverman, Covington Catholic’s Roger and Dan Tieman, Newport’s John Turner and Dick Vories, Bellevue’s Pat Uebel, NewCath’s Jim Weyer, and Holmes’ Bob White.
The nomination forms are available on the KHSAA.org website. Time to get to work, Northern Kentucky high school athletic directors. If the KHSAA wanted to play catch-up here, they could have a two-year run that instead of having no Northern Kentuckians inducted into the Hall of Fame, as we’ve just seen, more like two years of nothing but Northern Kentuckians. And as we noted above, that’s just from the 1950s.
There are plenty more where those come from. From a place called Northern Kentucky. And as hard as it seems at times for folks both here and downstate to realize, it is a part of Kentucky.
But only if we work at it.
Here’s the 2025 KHSAA Hall of Fame Class: Darren Bilberry (Ft. Knox); Clark Burckle Jr, Louisville St. Xavier; Robert “Bobby” Curtis, Louisville St. Xavier; Phil “Cookie” Grawemeyer, Louisville DuPont Manual; Donnie Gray, Clay County; Joe Hamilton, Lexington Dunbar; Billy Hicks; Evarts, Harlan, Corbin, Scott County; Stephanie Livers, Elizabethtown; George Randolph, Owensboro Catholic; Greg Todd, Berea/Lexington Catholic; Susan Shields White, Louisville Eastern; and Beth Vice Barrier, Montgomery County.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.