Ashley Rogers is a teenager, Wesley Cash a senior citizen.
She's a multiple state champion in softball and basketball; he's a mutiple national champion in tennis.
What they have in common is that they will be honored on Feb. 26 as the Greater Chattanooga Sports Hall of Fame athletes of the year for 2017.
Joining them in being recognized at the 6:30 p.m. banquet that Monday at the Chattanooga Convention Center will be 17 inductees, announced two weeks ago, and four other special award winners. Those include John Farr with the Walt Lauter Award and Sis Daughtrey Davis with the Betty Probasco Award, both for lifetime service related to athletics, and Meigs County all-region running back Martin Smith with the Allan Morris/Jim Morgan Award for overcoming adversity.
Lewis Card Jr. will receive the hall's most prestigious honor, the Fred Gregg Jr. Award. The co-founder of Card-Monroe Corp. is a longtime benefactor of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and of area young people in general.
Card, former board chairman of the Urban League of Chattanooga and former vice chairman of the Chamber of Commerce - among many business, education and other community involvements - has received service awards from UTC and the Southern Conference and was in the inaugural class of the Chattanooga High School Hall of Fame.
"Lewis Card not only has helped UTC, but he has been instrumental in a lot of kids getting an education," said Catherine Neely, president of the area hall of fame. "He's helped a lot of people, but what he does is behind the scenes. He's a very humble man."
Farr is a former hall president and Gregg Award recipient (2010) who has made his greatest impact in wrestling. After competing under the legendary Luke Worsham at Baylor, he moved on to UTC and was the team captain in 1956 after two seasons as "most improved." He then coached 31 individual state champions in 12 years at Red Bank High School with a 99-45-4 record and three team state titles (1963-65).
Farr directed TSSAA state tournaments from 1961 to 1969 and went on to coach at Central High and Chattanooga State. He also started the local wrestling officials association, officiated at two NCAA Division I tourneys and served in National Federation of Secondary Schools capacities.
Davis had a 2,000-point basketball career at Soddy-Daisy High School, where she also starred in volleyball and was a cheerleader. She scored 60 points in one game, averaged 30 per game for her career, played in the first girls' state tournament in 1958 and was chosen all-state. She played basketball and softball for employers Interstate Insurance and Kingsboro Mills and in the past 25 years has won numerous gold and silver medals in the Senior Games.
She also has coached youth basketball teams and was on the committee that started the Soddy-Daisy Kids Club in the early 1970s. She was the club's first treasurer.
Smith excelled for Meigs County's outstanding football team and in the classroom despite having lost his mother and brother a day apart last winter. He already had a very difficult life - by his own description in a Nov. 10 story in the Times Free Press he "kind of just bounced around from place to place" - but their deaths left him feeling "like I was on my own" as a high school sophomore.
An aunt took in Smith and his younger sister, though, and provided some long-sought stability that he enhanced with his own hard work in school and sports, by coaches' and teachers' accounts.
Rogers is another Meigs County star, but she doesn't attend the Decatur school. She's been the captain and all-state player of the TAACS basketball state champions at Fairview Christian in Athens, which does not field a softball team, so with the TSSAA's co-op program she has been able to pitch the Lady Tigers to the last two Class A state titles.
She holds the state-tournament strikeout record with 80 and has 1,003 career strikeouts with 441 in one season. She was an All-American and the Tennessee Gatorade softball player of the year last spring, and she signed in November to play next year with the Tennessee Vols.
Cash, a Manker Patten teaching pro, has been a doubles finalist in the last 15 USTA age-group nationals in which he's participated since 2012, winning 11, and those victories included the Men's 60s indoor and grass court events in 2017. Also last year he represented the United States in international competition for the fifth time, with two silver and two bronze medals, and he went undefeated in helping the four-man U.S. team finish third.
He followed that by reaching the World Individual 60s doubles final.
"The 23 individuals we're honoring represent a wide variety of sports, and the people are all so different," Neely said, "but they all blend in to exhibit character, integrity and leadership as well as athletic ability."
Tickets for the banquet cost $40 and can include tables of eight for $320. Call Neely at 842-7274.
Contact Ron Bush at rbush@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6291.