Dan Weber’s Just Sayin’: October NKY Sports Hall of Fame induction draws SRO crowd to Park Hills

The Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame inductions crowd was “the largest I’ve ever seen in my 22 years,” Vice-president Kenney Shields said of the standing-room-only get-together at The Arbors in Park Hills.

The six inductees made for an eclectic group, from six different sports with 124 years of coaching, from parochial and public schools, big and small, high school and college, and from Kenton, Campbell and Grant Counties.

• But it was Darrell Newton, a three-sport athlete at Dixie Heights (football/basketball/track) who has coached “thousands of kids (for the Ft. Mitchell Spartans program)” during his 60 years of marriage, and who said it best of the all-male Hall of Fame class: “All these guys in the Hall of Fame . . . their wives should be in the Hall of Fame.”

His criteria of success wasn’t his 105-5-1 record over 11 years with nine Peewee Super Bowls but the fact that if he started the season with 40 players – and finished with 40 — that was success.

“Never had one quit on me,” Newton said. However, his one year coaching the Cincinnati School for the Performing Arts high school basketball team had him saying “I had more fun over there, I had more fun with that,” even if half his team might be at a concert or a play – or in one – and arrive late for the game “and in makeup,” Newton said with a grin.

“Mr. Dixie Heights, Mr. Ft. Mitchell,” Shields called the popular hair stylist, who is as quick-witted as he was on his feet as a track and football star. Looking at his 1963 scrapbook, he noted that “I was pretty good . . . for five or six games.” He was also “the blocking back for Larry Schreiber (who would go on to star for the San Francisco 49ers).”

Newton got an early coaching start when as a senior, he was asked by legendary Dixie Heights football coach Bill Shannon if he wanted to coach as an offensive player not paying much attention when the defense was working. When he said yes, Shannon gave him a whistle, which Newton promptly blew while calling out “Water break.” And while the players got their break, he ended up running for the rest of practice.

• Heading out immediately at the end of inductions was Dayton High School’s Dr. Robert Herbst (Jamey on his name tag). “I’m going to run,” with “patients waiting at 3 o’clock,” the podiatrist with offices in Florence and Dayton said. Not that anyone should be surprised after leading Dayton to two state championships and two runner-up finishes in his four years running for the late Hall of Famer Barry Binkley . He also played basketball for another Hall of Famer, Stan Steidel . And he noted that “my brother Jesse is famous,” talking of the current Dayton football coach and dean of students.

An all-state, all-region and all-conference athlete at Dayton, Jamey went on to Georgetown College where he qualified for national championships and then later coached cross-country for more than a decade at Heritage Academy.

“Sports has a way of bonding and bringing people together,” Herbst said, with “three boys who played golf for (fellow inductee) Daryl (Landrum) and (wife) Becky ” in their youth golf program.

• Which gets us to the next inductee, Daryl Landrum who coached golf at NKU for 27 years, and where he – with his wife – founded the women’s golf program there. A PGA Golf Professional of the Year in Kentucky and twice PGA Junior Golf Leader, Daryl and his wife in 1998 founded the 7-UP Junior Tour which has allowed 200 young golfers for more than two decades to play course all around Northern Kentucky.

“One of the all-time great coaches of any sport in Northern Kentucky,” Shields described his fellow NKU coach. But first, Daryl, a Grant County native and product of the late Carl Wenderoth , wanted this known about his wife, Becky: “I got all the credit, she did all the work.” At NKU, Landrum’s teams won eight league titles, four NCAA regionals, qualified for 14 NCAA championships, while his women’s teams qualified for the NCAA 10 times in 11 years. All of which earned Landrum nine Coach of the Year honors in the league and four times in the NCAA Region.
The greatest honor for a coach, however, Landrum said, was “when you’re at Wal-Mart and have one of your former players come up and thank you.” Although Landrum, in noting that one of his former players was there for the induction, kidded that “the rest are probably in jail . . . no, that’s not true, they’re stockbrokers and lawyers.”

• Which gets us to the lawyer in the group, former Holy Cross and Thomas More (also Georgetown) basketball player John Fortner , whose son was sitting in for him “at a hearing in Louisville.” But never fear, the 6-foot-6, 240-pounder said (same as his playing height and weight at Holy Cross in 1975), he would keep his talk within the time limit. “I would lose cases when I went beyond three minutes.”

Two of the people he credited for getting him here were Ralph Kemphaus , his coach at Holy Cross who toughened him up from just being a shooter to an aggressive rebounder and defender. And then the legendary Jim Connor, for whom he played after transferring back from Georgetown to end up as a senior averaging 17 points and nine rebounds while earning the Bob Breinich Award based on talent and character.

“You don’t get here without people like that in your life,” and now, “the best thing is to be able to share it with my friends here,” said Fortner who recalled the years of a Holy Cross team without a gym that was a power program – “second only to Covington Catholic” – during his time there.

“Our 1972 team should have won the state,” he said, had Joe Meier not been lost with a knee injury and a Jack Givens -led Bryan Station team knocked them out.

• David Meier II , out of Covington Catholic and Thomas More, had a .380 career batting average at TMU and a school-record single-year earned run mark of 0.32 – yep, he allowed just one earned run all season. Those numbers produced all sorts of individual honors including conference Player of the Year, Division III All-Mideast and Academic All-American.

But it’s his 25 years and 255 wins and coaching varsity baseball – a sport he founded — and softball at Villa Madonna Academy and Notre Dame that makes you take notice, not to mention the sports complex at Villa and the Bamboo Gardens at NDA from his time at both schools.

“We’re a baseball family,” David said of the Meiers with his daughter earning the name “Becky Ballpark” from his VMA teams. And for him, with coaches and pitching machines and whiffle bats and balls coming from his father and all the rest of the family, he said that “more than anything in Northern Kentucky, it was the opportunity it provided.

But his coaching days – after 33 years as a youth coach and volunteer — aren’t finished, said the two-time NKAC Coach of the Year. He’s been helping out at Holy Cross and just got a call from Ryle where he’ll be the new softball coach. “I hope I coach another 20 years,” David says.

• Lloyd Memorial alum Barry Long was preaching. No surprise there, the Lloyd Class of 1967 alum was a pastor for 29 years. But his topic on this day was volleyball. “Our family is a volleyball family,” said Long, who earned one of the early volleyball scholarships to a Ball State program that was ahead of most of the nation except for the West Coast as volleyball became established and his Ball State team was a part of the first-ever NCAA Volleyball Final Four.

His dad played volleyball as did his two daughters, who were college players, and his grand-daughter now plays at Notre Dame. “Volleyball is coming up for women,” Barry said. His coaching mentors included his dad and longtime Erlanger Lions peewee football coach Harlan Strong . “He was a great coach, not recognized too much,” except for those who played for him.

Looking at “the athletes around this room that I grew up idolizing as a kid,” Long just shook his head at the thought of joining them. And then he finished with this: “Any good thing I ever did, it’s because of Him,” he said pointing directly up to the heavens.

Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com . Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.

The post Dan Weber’s Just Sayin’: October NKY Sports Hall of Fame induction draws SRO crowd to Park Hills appeared first on NKyTribune .