2004 Class Revealed
April 30, 2004 11:30 AM | General
May 2, 2004
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Six outstanding contributors to Mountaineer athletics make up the 14th class of honorees in the West Virginia University Sports Hall of Fame, announced today by athletic director Ed Pastilong.
"This is another tremendous group of inductees who represent the great Mountaineer tradition," Pastilong says. The 2004 class includes former basketball coaches Gale Catlett and Lee Patton, world-class wrestler Dominic Black, Olympic shooter Bruce Meredith, football legend Floyd "Ben" Schwartzwalder and multi-sport standout Charley Seabright.
Induction ceremonies will take place around the WVU-James Madison football game on September 25. This class brings the number of total inductees to 89.
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| Black |
Dominic Black
Dominic Black enjoyed a banner collegiate wrestling career at WVU. Black finished as one of only six wrestlers in school history to amass more than 100 career victories, posting a 105-36-2 mark. He capped his stellar career with impressive seasons in 1990 and 1991. As a junior, he went 33-5 to establish a record for wins in a season by a WVU 177-pounder, won an EWL title and competed in his second consecutive NCAA tournament. As a senior, Black posted a 39-win season (third best in school history), a second EWL crown and earned All-America honors (fourth-place finish) at the NCAA Championships.
Following collegiate competition, Black took first place in earning University Freestyle National Champion honors in 1992. Then in 1995, Black became the first West Virginia wrestler to ever represent the United States in an international event, as he won a gold medal in the 198-pound weight class at the World Cup of Freestyle. He entered the U.S. Army in November, 1997, and is currently a member of the Army’s World Class Athlete Program that allows him to wrestle and recruit for the Army.
Competing for his country, Black won the national title to earn a spot on the 1999 U.S. world championships team, and was a gold medalist at the 1999 Pan-American Games. In the 2000 Pan-American games, Black won a silver medal and qualified for the U.S. Olympic Trials with a second place finish. Black held a No. 1 world ranking in 2002 and won a gold medal at the Sunkist Kids/ASU International Open in October, 2003. He also a won the 2003 Military World Championships.
Black is currently a member of the U.S. national freestyle team, one of several athletes competing to wrestle at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. He currently has a No. 5 national ranking in freestyle at 96 kg/211.5 lbs. He holds two degrees from West Virginia, an undergraduate degree in sport management and a master’s degree in safety management. A native of Lexington, Ky., he resides in Colorado Springs for Olympic training.
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| Catlett |
Gale Catlett
Gale Catlett was a Mountaineer basketball player from 1959-63, helping the Mountaineers to records of 24-4, 26-6 and 23-8 and two NCAA tournament berths. After graduation in 1963, he started a career in college coaching that took him to Richmond, Davidson, Kansas and Kentucky. In 1972, he was named head coach at Cincinnati, posting a 126-44 record in six seasons, with three NCAA and one NIT appearance. During the 1976-77 season, his team was ranked as high as second in the nation.
Catlett returned to his alma mater as head coach in 1978, posting a WVU record of 439-276 over the next 24 years and an overall coaching mark of 565-320, making him just the 45th Division I coach all-time to win 500 career games. Taking 20 teams to postseason play (11 NCAA/9 NIT), he coached two Metro Conference champions (1975-76), five Atlantic 10 regular season and two A-10 tournament (1983-84) champions, and shepherded WVU’s move into BIG EAST competition, where his 1998 club advanced to the NCAA Sweet 16. He retired in 2002.
Catlett and his wife Anise, a Morgantown native and former WVU cheerleader, have two daughters, Krista (who is married to Ed Neumann) and Kara. They spend their time between homes in Morgantown and his hometown of Hedgesville, W.Va.
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| Meredith |
Bruce Meredith
Bruce Meredith, one of the most talented riflemen in WVU history, was born in Wheeling and grew up in Boggs Run, a coal mine hollow in what is now a part of Benwood. He hitchhiked in uniform every day to high school at Linsly Military Institute, which he attended on an athletic/work scholarship. He played football, basketball and served as captain of the track team; marksmanship was a mandatory class at Linsly and Meredith became their most successful student. Upon graduation in 1955, he walked several miles to work daily to the Wheeling Steel Mill for a year to save money for WVU, where he was determined to shoot with the rifle team, although that squad had no financial aid at that time.
Meredith lettered at WVU in 1958-61; through the course of his career, the WVU rifle team finished with a 42-16 record. As team captain, he led WVU to a record of 25-3 and their first collegiate national team title. He won the national individual smallbore championship with a record score. He was WVU’s initial first team rifle All-American in 1960 and repeated the honor in 1961. He was named Amateur Athlete of the Year by the W.Va. Sports Writers Association.
He served as Cadet Commander of the Army ROTC and graduated as a Distinguished Military Graduate. He went on to serve in the active Army for eight years and the reserve for 22 years, retiring as a full Colonel on July 4, 1991. He graduated from the Airborne and Ranger Schools, the Air Defense Artillery Advanced Course, the Command & General Staff College, the Air War College and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.
He competed in target shooting with the ARADCOM team at Forts MacArthur, Carson and Niagara. He won the 1,000 yard 1963 national championship at Camp Perry, firing the M-1 Garand rifle. He was senior officer of the Eighth Army (Korea) and U.S. Army Pacific (Hawaii) teams and was assigned to the All-Army team at Fort Benning, Ga., in 1965, being awarded the Distinguished Rifleman Badge and the President’s Hundred Tab. He holds the same honors with the .45 caliber pistol and won the NRA’s distinguished badges for smallbore rifle prone and position shooting.
Upon assignment to the U.S. Army International Rifle Team, he won the 1967 National Smallbore Prone Individual title at Camp Perry with a national record of 6396 and fired the first ever-perfect score of 3200 with telescopic sights. That year at the Pan American Games in Winnipeg, his team won the gold by setting a new world record in the 50 meter prone and won a second team gold in three-position rifle. He has shot in six Pan American Games.
Meredith organized the first international team for the Army Reserve. His recruiting and training resulted in the formation of a strong men’s team, the first world competition level women’s team and a Running Target Team – a special Olympic event. He was a member of the USA 300 meter team at the 1970 World Championships in Phoenix, where he won a silver team medal. His last performance for the USA was at the 1986 World Championships in Sweden.
He helped form the U.S. Armbrust (German for crossbow) Association in 1979. Meredith has competed in eight World Crossbow Championships, winning a silver team medal. This qualified him for the USA Distinguished Crossbow award making him the only American to be distinguished in six shooting disciplines: air rifle, air pistol, free pistol, running target, smallbore rifle and free rifle.
In 1987, Meredith began coaching and competing in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He won the silver individual medal in the Pan American Games in Argentina in 1995, and competed in four Pan Am Games on a four-member team that won a gold and silver medal, setting a world record.
Meredith, an active competitor for 53 years, qualified for the Olympic Games in Seoul 1988, Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000. In Sydney, Meredith received volumes of publicity as the oldest competitor in the games at age 63. He competed in World Championships in Russia (1990), Italy (1994), Spain (1998) and Finland (2002), five times in the Championships of the Americas, winning bronze in Puerto Rico (1989) and Peru (1993) and five times at the Central American and Caribbean Games where he won another bronze.
He has set 164 USA national records. He was inducted into the U.S. Army Reserve International Rifle Roll of Honor in 2000 and serves on the Statutes and Eligibility Committee of the International Shooting Sport Federation. He owns Mountaineer Appraisal & Realty, doing business in Georgia and North Carolina.
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| Patton |
Lee Patton
The late Lee Patton was an outstanding WVU basketball coach from 1946-50. A Carbon, Texas, native, Patton led the Mountaineers to a 91-26 overall record during his tenure for a .778 winning percentage, still the second best in school history.
Patton led West Virginia to two straight NIT berths in 1946 and 1947. Under his direction, WVU posted a school-record 57-game home winning streak that ended in the final home game of the 1949 season against Pitt.
Prior to coaching at WVU, Patton was both a basketball and football coach at Princeton (W.Va.) High where his basketball teams made it to the state tournament six times and his 1943 football squad finished the year undefeated. Patton, a 1927 graduate of Arizona State College, also coached at Iona Preparatory School in New York.
Fondly nicknamed "Worry Bird," Coach Patton passed away in February, 1950, from complications suffered after a Valentine’s Day automobile accident. He was survived by his wife Agnes and two daughters, Anne Patton Heater and Laura Lee Patton. Both daughters are graduates of WVU.
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| Schwartzwalder |
Ben Schwartzwalder
The late Floyd "Ben" Schwartzwalder excelled in two sports for WVU from 1930-32. The Point Pleasant, W.Va., native will go down as one of the smallest centers in Mountaineer history, weighing only 148 pounds while playing for Coach Earle "Greasy" Neale. Schwartzwalder also starred as a wrestler for Coach Steve Harrick, winning all-campus in 1930 in the 155-pound weight class.
After graduating from college, Schwartzwalder coached high school football for six seasons in West Virginia and Ohio, winning two state championships with Parkersburg High, before joining the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne as a paratrooper in 1941. In his years of service he saw action in D-Day in 1944 and also earned a many awards, including a Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, four battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation. The military also named Schwartzwalder governor of Essen, Germany, for about six months following the fall of Nazi Germany.
From 1946-48 he coached Muhlenberg (N.J.) College to a 25-5 record before heading to Syracuse to coach the Orangemen. As head coach from 1949-73, he mounted an impressive 153-91-3 record there. His teams went to seven bowls, winning the national championship in 1959 and four Lambert Trophies (1952, 1956, 1959 and 1966).
For his efforts in the team’s national championship season of 1959, Schwartzwalder was named National Coach of the Year. In 1967, he was elected president of the National Football Coaches Association. Schwartzwalder coached many football legends including Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy (1961). He also coached Heisman candidates Jim Brown (1956), Floyd Little (1965 and 1966) and Larry Csonka. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1982. The trophy given to the winner of the annual WVU-Syracuse football game is named for him.
Schwartzwalder married fellow WVU graduate Ruth "Reggie" Simpson and the couple had two children: Susan and Mary. He passed away in 1993 at age 83.
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| Seabright |
Charley Seabright
The late Charley Seabright was a versatile athlete at WVU from 1938-41, earning three letters in football, two in basketball and two in baseball. A native of Wheeling, W.Va., Seabright was an all-state athlete in football, basketball and baseball at Benwood Union High (now John Marshall) before coming to play for the Mountaineers.
Seabright averaged 4.1 points per game and scored 77 career points as a guard in basketball and started at first base in baseball, hitting over .300 for his career. He excelled most at football, where he was a standout quarterback for three years as a Mountaineer. He signed a professional contract with the Cleveland Rams of the NFL in 1941, but left the team to serve in the U.S. Army in World War II from 1942-44, where he saw combat in Germany.
When he returned from the war, he played both offense and defense for the NFL Pittsburgh Steelers from 1946-50 and was a member of the Steelers’ 1947 team that lost a one-game playoff to eventual champion Philadelphia. That team is widely considered to be Pittsburgh’s best squad till the great teams of the 1970s. Seabright was known for being a relentless blocker as a wingback and is also recognized as one of the last two-way players in the NFL before two-platoon football was instituted in the late 1940s.
He was voted to the WVU football all-time team (1940-49) and was awarded with a sportsmanship award by the Charleston Sportsman Club in 1980.
Seabright and his wife, the former Alice Olveski, had four children: Chuck, Jim, Joyce and Charlene. He worked for Valley Machine in Martins Ferry, Ohio, for 28 years as a production manager. Seabright died at the age of 62 in March, 1981, in Wheeling.
