After being added to Tennessee Tech’s Wall of Fame for softball earlier this year, former Soddy-Daisy High School and Chattanooga State pitcher Brandy Henry Kleeman is being inducted into the TTU Sports Hall of Fame this weekend.
Kleeman is one of four inductees being honored at a dinner Friday night and at the homecoming football game Saturday in Cookeville. The dinner starts at 6:30 CST in the multipurpose room of the university center, and tickets will be available at the door.
Kleeman was the Golden Eagles’ softball ace both of her years at Tech and pitched a record 284 innings as a senior in 2000, when they had a 40-win season. She had 30 victories with a 1.43 ERA and 11 shutouts after winning 17 games with a 1.39 ERA as a junior.
“Both honors are unbelievable,” she said Wednesday. “For the Wall of Fame, to be up there with people like [former area standouts] Beth Keylon and Andrea Roark is such a great honor. And now to go into the overall hall of fame, to look at the other three being inducted this year and look through the list of athletes already part of that, in all the sports, is very humbling.
“I feel very fortunate and very blessed. I have to make a speech, and ‘thank you’ just doesn’t seem enough.”
Brandy, who married former TTU baseball player Brad Kleeman in 2003, spent one season as the pitching coach at Kennesaw State University and has coached high school ball. She was an elementary school teacher in Georgia and then was an assistant principal for a year but gave up that job when her son was born two years ago.
Now she teaches through Georgia Cyber Academy, which she described as “like public school except the kids are able to do their studies from home. I do that from home, too, so I can continue my profession and be available for my son. It’s the best of both worlds.”