I'm going into the Radford University Athletics Hall of Fame Sept. 30, and as I collect my voluminous thoughts, I realize there's no way I can tell all the stories I always dreamed I would.

There are just too many people I must thank.

Then I thought, hey, I have this space my Highlander pals gave me and maybe I should post here about my time. So let me pull back the curtain a bit on a 15-year career in RU athletics and some of the most fun moments and funniest things said and heard.
 
WASHINGTON SCORED HERE: First, a quote that sums up how things seemed to work for me. Dante Washington scored six goals in a game (one of TWO times he did that) and The Washington Post called me to ask if we were promoting Dante for the Hermann Award (soccer's top honor). I got quoted in The Post for saying, "Hermann Award? Six is a touchdown, we're promoting Dante for the Heisman!"
 
Marooned in the Moffett Mud
The spring of 1984, one of the greatest years ever for the Highlanders across the board, I was in my first year as full-time, hey-look-at-me-I'm-an-adult staffer in sports information. It was our last Division II year and we won so much, in everything, it was obvious we were ready to move up.

I contend, though, that one of the biggest wins in school history came in a sport in which we no longer compete – men's lacrosse. Back in that magical time before all the bigger schools just spent bigger money than everyone else, the little guys could compete. And we did. 

In Virginia, Roanoke College and Washington & Lee were national powers competing with the big boys even in D-I lacrosse, lots of great players from the north matriculating south to the bucolic campuses and solid programs at schools where local high schools weren't even playing lacrosse yet.

Fourth-ranked Roanoke College was making a rare visit to Radford in a mid-week game on Moffett Field. I remember it rained so hard I went into the stairwell landing in Draper to watch through a window as Radford knocked off the mighty Maroons, who had won a national title in 1978 and were a perennial powerhouse. I learned the game in Salem watching those teams.

Now here I was at Radford watching our upstarts, who had lost at Roanoke 25-3 the previous season, pull a shocker that resonated throughout the sport. We went 10-3 that season under coach Doug Bartlett and I remember how future RU coach Steve Billings battled RC All-American Rocco Guglielmo in the draw circle and was a defensive terror. Mike Stevens was our big goal scorer and goalie Greg Kaplan was stellar, too, in a 7-3 win reported by everyone and usually including the phrase "in the Moffett Mud."

Famously, one of our photographers got a sequence of Bartlett being tossed into a large puddle after the game and that sort of summed up a day that the Highlanders threw the lacrosse powers that be on their head.

Knowing the impact of this moment for our program and local media, none of whom were in attendance, I raced to the Peters Hall locker room to get quotes from Bartlett, but also fiery Maroons coach John Pirro, who wasn't very happy about the game, field conditions or basically, anything at this moment.

Those quotes helped me get us on the front of The Roanoke Times sports page, a big deal back then, and allowed us more in other major media, too. I still wasn't dry – no one on the field that day was – hours later when I finally got to BT's to celebrate. It's one of my favorite memories.
 
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: BT's, where the Highlanders huddled back in the day, had just named a sandwich for basketball coach Oliver Purnell when Purnell announced a week or so later he was heading to his alma mater, Old Dominion after three years at RU. My boss and great friend Rick Rogers put a good face on it for the restaurant, saying, "You can still order the sandwich, only now you can only get it to go."
 
I Must Protect Our House!
It's 1990-91, and the Radford women's basketball program is headed for its first losing campaign EVER. New coach Luby Lichonczak lost some players and most of the season, to be honest. We just weren't very good. We only had eight scholarship players by the time we hosted the Big South Conference Tournament that March. We weren't favored to win our fourth title in the first five years of conference play or to even make the finals.

In our late regular season home game against powerful arch rivals, Campbell, I thought we played as well as we could and lost by nine as the Camels flipped a switch late. But in the tournament, things were different. We played loose and looked confident. It would become a trademark of Luby's teams. He won six consecutive Big South Tournaments with some really good teams, some okay teams and even a couple of teams that truly overachieved. It was, in retrospect, somewhat mystical.

In the title game with Campbell, we were again leading late in the second half, playing our hearts out with a painfully young backcourt and a team that had been through a wringer. That great CU team battled back again and took a lead late.

We were in-bounding under our own basket with six seconds left and Luby had drawn up a play for freshman and future RU Hall-of-Famer Shannan Wilkey, who had already beaten VCU with a long jumper at the buzzer. But the Camels had Wilkey blanketed, and the pass went to junior Roz Groce who dribbled the length of the floor.

She was able to do that because Jill Hilton, a 6-3, former walk-on from Rural Retreat had become a shot-blocking monster in the postseason (13 blocks in three games, six against Charleston So., both records). Hilton's screen at mid-court took out two Camels.

I remember thinking Groce dribbled too far down the left side, went too deep with too little time, as I watched from my press row seat. Groce got to the foul line extended and fired. From my angle, I saw the shot was going in as soon as she released. I grabbed the arm of Radford News Journal reporter and RU alum Ralph Berrier Jr. We both leaned toward the shot as it swished through at the buzzer to set off a wonderful on-court celebration.

I quickly composed myself to do my job, which was to finish counting the ballots for the all-tournament team and deliver across the floor to Brack Smith at the PA microphone. However, I did allow myself one personal extravagance. 

All week, the proud, orange-clad Campbell fans had come to the games early and filled the prime blue seats. It was "festival seating" so that was their right. I had listened to them all week and one fan in particular, a younger brother of a CU player, had basically occupied three seats in the very middle, down low and had made his presence felt throughout, often by banging the blue seats on either side of him. It drove me crazy. I said something early in the week but then I realized all the Camel fans thought I was just a Radford guy upset at how the season and the tournament was going. 

Few things were as cathartic for me, as getting up, whirling around to run to the other side of the floor and taking a second. I looked at the kid and just said, "Easy on the furniture, Junior."

Luby would say, 'We ran the picket fence at them!" I called Campbell's defense "Groce Negligence."

In coming years, I learned that Luby NEVER used the game plan he thought could win during the BSC regular season because he was focused on the tournament. I didn't necessarily agree with the strategy, but it got me three NCAA Tournament watches and a lot of photos with championship trophies. 

Campbell was replaced by UNC Greensboro as our nemesis atop the Big South women's standings and it was such a big game when the two programs clashed, I used to love to take as much student media and our own student staff in a van for the quick drive down to Greensboro. Again, with Luby holding his best schemes for later, we invariably got pounded. I always told our students it was okay. Hold your head high, shake their hands firmly, congratulate them and smile like you know something they don't.
 
We went 3-0 against UNCG in Big South Tournament championship games.
 
MIKE KNOWS BOW: Rick and I volunteered to work the first Commonwealth Games one summer in Roanoke. It was a chance to connect with our major media and do some good in Virginia athletics. We were set up in the "Media Center" at the Tanglewood Holiday Inn. The idea was to field calls from the venues around the Valley and help get the info out. The only problem was that no venues ever called with results. We sat around and ate peanuts and drank Diet Coke with local writers and TV folk.

A call did come in, and the media there heard me in action. "Commonwealth Games Media Center. The archery venue? I'm not sure where that is. I guess, just follow the arrows." That got me quoted in Jack Bogaczyk's Roanoke Times column that Sunday.
 
The Great Names in Soccer: Pele', Dante, Staley
It's still the early 90s and Don Staley's soccer teams have become some of the most entertaining squads ever at Radford behind Dante Washington, Jeff and Doug Majewski and Sean Peay and those are just the guys from Columbia, Md. We had Ian Spooner, Frederic Rondeau, Darryl Springer, Whitney Keillor, Lee Morton and John Tierney, too.

To drum up even more attention in what was another great rivalry, Staley and Virginia Tech coach Jerry Cheynet fished a huge rock out of the New River and made it a prize for the winner of the annual game. It worked. We got more newspaper and TV coverage, and the game was always played in front of large crowds. Admittedly the bench-clearing fight in 1990 didn't hurt but "The New River Rock" became a thing. Although I feared for Staley's life one year we won, and he tried to heft it above his head for the cameras. I thought he was going to crush his own skull.

As you've probably noted above, I liked our SID office to be perceived with a certain dignity, usually much better demonstrated by my boss and mentor, Rick Rogers. He let me do what I do, though: schmooze media, fire up our student troops and every now and then show some competitiveness of my own. 

Whichever school won "The Rock," got to take it "home" for a year to display and paint the school logo and score on it. We turned that over to our talented graphics folks in the Public Information Office. We and the Virginia Tech SID office would crank things up with a news release before the next meeting in the fall highlighting the rivalry.

My competitive nature kicked in one year when Tech sent out a release with some facts on The Rock -- where it was fished out and how much it weighed. These releases are lost in files somewhere back in a storage at RU, next to Indiana Jones' Ark of the Covenant. 

This doesn't seem to mean much now but our massive mailing list (how old does that sound?) and the interest in this soccer game meant we were going to get a lot of stories run in the small local papers that would use (free) stuff like that and we'd get more attention from bigger media (Roanoke and Lynchburg in particular). 

So when we won The Rock back, I --okay, a couple of our students-- took it over to our geology department to my undergrad geology professor, Dr. Robert Whisonant. We had them analyze it. I can't remember what period the rock came from (Staleyenzoic, I think), but I was able to include a couple of paragraphs with a much more technical analysis and yes, every paper ran it and credited Radford University.

None of these details mattered in the long run. Dante & Co., were so much fun to watch play that attendance at the old Dedmon Center upper field was never an issue. It was a raucous atmosphere and fans rarely went home disappointed. In addition to his Hall of Fame coaching career, Staley was quite the showman and recruiter. I miss those days. 

Dr. Whisonant, thank heavens, didn't remember me from my undergrad days in Reed Hall. I missed a lot of labs because of a pesky conflict with my intramural football schedule. I did, however, graduate with a 3.7 GPA in my major and use this as an unapologetic segue to mention you can make donations to an academic scholarship in support of like-minded students (who love writing, sports and Radford) started by former student workers and colleagues. https://inspire.radford.edu/project/32122
 
IN OVER MY HEAD: The flooding off the lower Dedmon Center parking lot and lower field seemed like an annual occurrence. Every spring we seeded that field with new Bermuda grass and later, someone down in Christiansburg had a wonderful lawn. I was asked about it by the local paper and I let my frustration out. "I was told the Dedmon Center was built on a 100-year flood plain. If that's true, I've worked here 700 years."
 
Diamond Superstitions & Other Shenanigans 
Baseball came to dominate my springs at Radford, something I didn't think about when I walked into Dr. Dedmon's office as a student in 1982 with a petition to start a club team. I didn't know I'd be back at the alma mater a couple of years later chronicling the first varsity team. I'm not complaining. Once computerized stats and winning got into the equation it was lot more fun and a lot less time-consuming. Coach Scott Gines and assistant Matt Sutphin, then Lew Kent, started bringing in great players and turning out winning teams in the late 80s and early 90s, which also helped my frame of mind about the long hours.

I was with baseball so often, I have tons of stories. Not all for print. Fond memories. Thinking about the stuff that made me smile back in the day, is making me smile again. Hall of Fame SS Kelly Dampeer had a Flintstones' Chewable Vitamin right before every game. Later when he was playing short season rookie ball, he came through with the Indians for a game at Pulaski, the first year they served beer. Someone came up with an RU promotion to "Go to Pulaski, see Dampeer and have a damn beer!"

I shouldn't have added that. His father was a minister in Roanoke, and I remember him standing on the concourse at then-DC Park in his suit watching games. He lent an air of dignity to the proceedings, I always thought.

My other favorite baseball superstitions involved ace starting pitcher Tim Manwiller, as was pregame custom all the players chipping in to set up for the game. Before his starts, he would go up in the old baseball press box, and flip every toggle for the big centerfield scoreboard to make sure they all lit up. I used to kid him that was just making sure the zeroes were there when he threw his no-hitter. I wasn't far off. He got drafted by the Oakland A's in 1997.

I think my favorite tradition was supplied by Verona, Virginia's Eric Harris, a four-year letterman on the mound who became a stalwart stopper his senior season in 1996. He was 6-0 with five starts and had a 3.86 ERA. Eric became our Sunday starter in weekend conference series', meaning he got the nine-inning shift, not the Saturday doubleheader.

Every Sunday when I arrived for the early afternoon home game, with a University Market sub and newspaper in hand, I found Eric asleep in the press box. I started coming later just so our starting pitcher could get more rest.

We tried to keep it lively at games over the PA between innings. I instituted an early innings trivia question, usually something from out skimpy (not many seasons yet) record book. I'd always make up a sponsor, my favorite – "Today's trivia question brought to you by De Vilbiss Funeral Home. De Vilbiss, we're the last ones to let you down." For years, that business had the only tent in Radford, and you saw it everywhere. By the way, the folks at De Vilbiss did a great job and are a New River Valley institution though I hope I don't have to avail myself of their quality services anytime soon.

Every now and then I would sneak in a national sponsor and their slogan, but I never did that with as much aplomb as some of my students when they got behind the mic. Senior student assistant Bobby Welsby turned in the all-time performance. He mentioned NyQuil as our title sponsor and rattled off "The nighttime sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, so you can rest medicine" without a hitch. He got a standing ovation from the crowd and became an instant legend in our office.

By the way, the fabulous prize for successfully answering the trivia question was an RU Baseball Media Guide and once or twice, a slice of our pizza we ordered and didn't finish.