GALLERY OF PREVIOUS INDUCTEES / Click here
Hall of Fame inductees for 2014: Weldon "Stoney" Phillips, Gene McCarley, Lanny White, Wes Hubert, John Holmes and Alicia Mills.
(Left) Alicia Mills winning the state high-jump championship in 1988; (right) Lanny White on the run for Pasadena High in 1967.
The name of Weldon “Stoney” Phillips, considered by many the architect of athletics in the Pasadena ISD, will be enshrined this spring during the grand opening of a facility even Phillips couldn’t have envisioned.
The Pasadena ISD’s first director of athletics, Phillips has been selected for induction in the Pasadena ISD Athletics Hall of Fame along with five sports standouts whose careers spanned four decades.
The six new inductees will be honored during the Athletics Hall of Fame’s third annual induction banquet, set for April 12 at the field house that bears Phillips’s name. The event will also celebrate the ribbon-cutting of the actual Hall of Fame facility, a 3,000-square foot wing added during the recent renovation and expansion of Phillips Field House.
Phillips will be honored posthumously, as will Gene McCarley, a basketball star at Pasadena High in the 1950s who went on to star at Baylor and then coach in the Pasadena ISD.
The other four inductees are:
*Lanny White, an all-state halfback for Pasadena High in the late 1960s;
*Wes Hubert, a standout lineman for South Houston High who went on to earn All-Southwest Conference honors at the University of Texas in the late 1970s;
*John Holmes, a South Houston High graduate who ranked as one of the nation’s top distance runners in the 1980s;
* And Alicia Mills Polzin, a state-high jump champion for Dobie High in 1988 who also starred on the volleyball court for the Lady Longhorns, Long Beach State and on several professional circuits.
The inductions will bring the number of honored athletes and coaches to 26.
The first two Athletics Hall of Fame banquets were sellouts with a total attendance of over 800. Ticket details, for both public sales and table sponsorships, will be announced in the next few days.
A guest emcee will also be announced soon. Former ABC-TC sportscaster Dan Lovett emceed the 2012 banquet. Former Houston Oilers quarterback Dan Pastorini served as emcee last year when the banquet was moved to Memorial High to allow for construction at Phillips Field House.
Last year banquet organizers awarded two scholarships to Pasadena ISD student/athletes, one boy and one girl. As part of this year’s banquet, two scholarships will again be awarded, each for $2,000, a $500 increase from 2013. Application details are expected to be announced soon.
Polzin will be the third female to be inducted, the first two being Dobie graduate Christa Williams, a two-time Olympic gold-medal winner in softball, and Amanda Buffalo, a former Pasadena High distance runner who won the first state championship by any Pasadena ISD female in any sport.
Although he coached football at Pasadena High in the early 1950s, Phillips will be the first individual inducted into the Athletics Hall of Fame as an administrator. He served as director of athletics for the district from 1957 to 1979.
Funds for the renovation of Phillips Field House, and for the Athletics Hall of Fame facility, were approved by voters in the 2011 school bond election.
