Dr. Ron Bishop, founder of SCORE International and former award-winning basketball coach and athletic director at Tennessee Temple University, has been chosen as the 2015 winner of the Fred Gregg Jr. Memorial Award.
The award is presented annually by the Greater Chattanooga Sports Hall of Fame. Bishop will be honored posthumously. He died last June.
The Gregg Award is given to a person who has significally influenced sports in the area. Bishop follows Rick Honeycutt, the Los Angeles Dodgers pitching coach and Fort Oglethorpe native, who was the recipient in 2014. Bishop also was a north Georgia resident.
The award is considered the most prestigious honor given at the annual banquet, scheduled this year for March 2 at the Chattanooga Convention Center. Tickets are on sale by contacting Catherine Neely at 842-7274. They are $35 apiece and tables for eight may be reserved for $280.
Bishop became head basketball coach and AD at Temple in 1975. In the ensuing decade, his teams averaged winning nearly 28 games a year. He and associate head coach DeWayne "Lefty" Glascock led the Crusaders to four National Christian College Athletic Association Division I championships and an overall record of 279-68.
Bishop resigned his TTU positions following the 1984-85 season when he and his wife, Pat, formed SCORE (Serving Christ Our Redeemer Enterprises). The ministry focused primarily on the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, sending athletic teams, principally in basketball, to play against teams from those countries.
But he also recruited young men and women to travel to elsewhere in Central America, South America and Europe.
He later expanded the sports menu to include softball, volleyball, soccer, baseball and football. Many of those who traveled with Coach Bishop were from the Chattanooga area.
"Ron had a great impact on Temple, our city and our country because he was taking athletes from the U.S. to foreign countries," Glascock said. "I remember a man telling Ron that SCORE would never score. Man, was he ever wrong."
Bishop used athletics to present the claims of Jesus Christ wherever he traveled. SCORE has had an impact in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries.
"I just can't think of any person who had a more positive impact on so many young people in the Chattanooga area as Ron Bishop," said former Chattanooga Times Free Press sports editor Sam Woolwine. "He had such an engaging personality that wherever he went, he made friends. He was a friend of the common man and of such well-known athletes as Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Andy Benes, Bobby Jones (former NBA star), Reggie White, John Hannah and so many others."
"He was a great emissary and communicator," said John Zeller, former Temple baseball coach who took Bishop's place as president of SCORE.
Bishop is a member of the Greater Chattanooga Sports Hall of Fame, the Blacksburg (S.C.) High School Hall of Fame and the NCCAA Hall of Fame.
The banquet also will honor members of the Hall of Fame Class of 2014, as well as the area male and female athletes of the year and winners of the Betty Probasco and Walt Lauter Lifetime Achievement awards and the Allen Morris/Jim Morgan Award for overcoming adversity. The other award winners and the Hall of Fame class will be announced in the near future.