Canada's Lanni Marchant smiles after finishing 4th in the Women's Marathon race during the Commonwealth Games Glasgow 2014, Scotland, Sunday July 27, 2014. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison)
Ohio State safety Vonn Bell plays against Maryland in an NCAA college football game Saturday, Oct. 10, 2015, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)Two former local high school football standouts who recently ended their college careers as All-Americans, Vonn Bell at Ohio State and Jacob Huesman at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, will share the honor of male athlete of the year at the Greater Chattanooga Sports Hall of Fame induction banquet on March 14.
Another former UTC standout, Lanni Marchant, is the organization's female athlete of the year for qualifying in 2015 to represent Canada in the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. She holds the Canadian women's records for the marathon and half marathon but works at Chattanooga law firm Speek, Webb, Turner & Newkirk and lives in Red Bank.
Matthew Crownover could have been an athlete of the year but is sharing one of the hall's other special awards, the Morgan/Morris Award for overcoming adversity. The former Ringgold High School baseball ace was a first-team All-American and the Atlantic Coast Conference pitcher of the year in 2015 and a sixth-round draft choice of the Washington Nationals, with whom he signed a contract last June.
The left-hander had elbow-ligament surgery in March 2012 but made 46 pitching starts and 48 appearances in three seasons at Clemson, working in the Tigers' weekend rotation throughout the 2014 and 2015 seasons. He was 25-12 with a 2.30 earned run average, 243 strikeouts in 278 1/3 innings and only 74 walks allowed as a college pitcher.
The other recipient of the Morgan/Morris Award? It's Susan Crownover, Matthew's mother and a long-successful Girls Preparatory School coach who required a kidney transplant after years of dealing with IgA nephropathy, also known as Berger's disease. The transplant took place in November 2014 and Coach Crownover was back directing her softball Bruisers in the 2015 season, when they were the state runners-up.
Chattanooga native, GPS alumna and longtime Tennessee State University coach and athletic director Teresa Lawrence Phillips will receive the Betty Probasco Award for lifetime achievement and service. The corresponding men's honor, the Walt Lauter Award, will go posthumously to Larry Fleming, an area secondary school coach for 46 years and also a youth minister.
The Hall of Fame dinner will begin at 6:30 p.m. on March 14 at the Chattanooga Convention Center, and tickets are available for $40 per person through Catherine Neely at 423-842-7274. This is the organization's 50th year, and added to the festivities is a 5 p.m. reception for all past and new inductees.
The 2015 class of inductees will be announced soon, as will the winner of the hall's top annual honor, the Fred Gregg Jr. Award.
Huesman came from Baylor School to enjoy a record-smashing career for his father's UTC program, with Mocs career records of 8,197 passing yards, 743 completions, 64 passing touchdowns, a .673 completion percentage (also a Southern Conference record), 4,051 rushing yards, 788 rushes, 15 100-yard rushing games, 43 rushing TDs, 107 total TDs and 12,248 yards of total offense. He was a three-time Southern Conference offensive player of the year and a two-time FCS All-American and served as a counselor at the Manning Passing Academy.
Bell started his high school career at Central and went from Ridgeland High School as a five-star prospect to Ohio State, where he was a starting safety for the national champions last year and another one-loss team this past season. He totaled 92 tackles and six interceptions as a sophomore, with a key pickoff and eight solo tackles in the national semifinal win over Alabama and six tackles and a sack in the title win against Oregon.
Bell announced after his All-America junior season that he would be available for the NFL draft this spring.
Marchant, who grew up in Ontario and was the overall SoCon athlete of the year in 2006-07, qualified for the Rio Olympics in both the 10,000-meter run and the marathon. She achieved an IAAF Olympic standard for the 26.2-mile race in time for the 2012 London Olympics, but it fell short of Canada's standard for representation. She took care of that with her 2:28:00 national record in the Toronto Watefront Marathon in October 2013 and fell short of her record by only nine seconds at the same event last October.
Among many other achievements, Phillips played basketball for Vanderbilt and was the first overall Lady Commodore athlete of the year. After serving as an assistant coach at Vanderbilt, she stayed in Nashville as the head coach at Fisk for four years and at TSU for 11, including Ohio Valley Conference championships. She became the AD in April 2002 and gained national notice when she coached the TSU men for one game in February 2003.
Fleming was well-known for his Fellowship of Christian Athletes work and related influence as well as for his coaching. He also exhibited unselfish service in working to improve facilities at the area schools where he worked, including the construction of the track at Rossville High.