For the 24th year, the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association is pleased to announce its incoming Hall of Fame Class.
The 2019 class includes WRSW’s Rita Price and WHME-TV’s Chuck Freeby and is set to be inducted at its annual awards banquet on April 7 at Valle Vista Country Club in Greenwood.
Price has been on the WRSW airwaves in Warsaw for nearly six decades, and she has spent 46 years covering local sports for the station. She is already a member of the Indiana Broadcasters Hall of Fame and the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. In 2017, she celebrated her 75th birthday by broadcasting 75 games on WRSW: 10 football games and 65 basketball games.
Freeby is a 1986 graduate of the University of Notre Dame and has been a voice of various levels of sports in the area since that time. For 17 years, he covered high school sports for WNDU-TV. For the past 15 years, Freeby has served as the Sports Director of WHME-TV, handling play-by-play duties for the high school game of the week, as well as serving as the voice of Notre Dame baseball on WHME radio. Freeby was named the ISSA’s Marv Bates Sportscaster of the Year in 2017.
Other members of the class include Gordon Engelhardt (Evansville Courier & Press), Mike Haynes (former voice of the Colorado Avalanche), Robin Miller (NBC Sports Network and formerly the Indianapolis Star) and Art Saltsberg (WOWO Ft. Wayne).
In addition to these new Hall of Famers, the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association will recognize Rick Semmler, WTHI Terre Haute, as the Marv Bates Sportscaster of the Year; Mike Carmin, Lafayette Journal & Courier, as the Corky Lamm Sportswriter of the Year; Steve Fields, formerly of the Greencastle Banner-Graphic, with the Ron Lemasters Lifetime Achievement Award; and Mike Skvara, ESPN 97.7, with the Bob Williams Helping Hand Award.
The Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association was founded in 1946. It created its Hall of Fame 50 years later in 1996. With the addition of the Class of 2019 the Hall of Fame will have 117 members.
