Which female athletes would you include in a proposed Conecuh County Sports Hall of Fame?

Coach Natalie Nelson Mims instructs Hillcrest player in 2013.

I got my legs streaked a little bit last week after the paper came out over my column in this space about the proposed Conecuh County Sports Hall of Fame.

Those of you who read it will remember that I gave a long list of potential inductees into this fictional hall of fame, and a close reading of those names revealed that I didn’t include one single female in that list. Several female readers, rightfully so, got on to me for this oversight, and it got me to thinking about the top female athletes in county history.

Coming up with a list of deserving female athletes is more challenging than coming up with a list of top male athletes. This is simply because, historically, more emphasis has been placed on male sports than female sports. When it comes to female sports, about the only two sports available to females locally has been basketball and softball with a little track and field thrown in for good measure.

Off the top of my head, I would be sure to include players who were part of state basketball championships at Conecuh County Training School and Sparta Academy. Conecuh County Training School’s girls teams won state titles in 1952, 1954, 1956 and 1957 while competing in the Alabama Interscholastic Athletic Association, which was the governing body for Alabama’s black high schools until the AIAA merged with the Alabama High School Athletic Association in 1968.

Sparta Academy’s girls have won five state titles over the years. The Alabama Independent School Association crowned its first girls champions in 1973 and Sparta’s girls won their first title in 1996. They also won the Class A title in 1997 and 1998 and followed that with state titles in 2003 and 2009.

Conecuh County has placed a number of great female athletes on various all-state teams in basketball and softball. I’ve never seen a complete list of these girls, but I suspect the list is pretty long. In fact, more than a few of these players made all-state teams in more than one sport.

There have also been more than a few local female athletes who have signed scholarships to play college ball and some of them have gone to coach in the college ranks. Again, I have never seen a complete list of those players, so it would be interesting to know just how many went on to play and coach in the college ranks. Hillcrest High School’s Natalie Nelson Mims and Sparta Academy’s Andrea Ward Lemmond are two great examples of local female basketball players who played college ball and then entered the coaching ranks.

In the end, let me hear from you if you know of other top female athletes who would deserve a place in a Conecuh County Sports Hall of Fame. Many of you in the reading audience likely witnessed first hand these top performers, and it would be interesting to hear who you would nominate. Send me your nominees and your reason for nominating them, and I’ll run them down in the paper at a later date.