I received a special award Thursday afternoon at the Boys Sweet 16 in Rupp Arena during halftime of Boyd County’s game with Marshall County. Special because of the people whose names are attached to it. It was the Bob White/Mike Fields KHSAA Media Service Award. Bob (53 years writing for The Courier-Journal) and Mike (35 ½ years at Herald-Leader, 41 as a sportswriter) are the two best high school sports reporters in the state over the last 65 years.
From left: Mike Fields, John Henson, Mark Maynard.
Bob, who passed in 2024, was a mentor to many of us when he was at the C-J. What a kind person he was. Mike handed the award to me and that meant so much because of how much he has done for high school sports in the state. He was a peer and good friend during nearly all my 42 years at The Daily Independent.
Also, kudos to KHSAA Commissioner Julian Tackett, who started the award. He has been a tremendous leader for Kentucky high school sports. A really good man and someone I’ve known and respected for decades. Julian put the award together for the first time last year because he understood the importance Bob White and Mike Fields to Kentucky high school sports, and there were others in the state who should be honored, too. Thank you, KHSAA and Julian, for recognizing those who tell the stories of our high school sports heroes in Kentucky.
Along with myself, John Henson of the Harlan Enterprise and retired Kentucky Press Association chief David Thompson were recognized with the honor this year. That’s two more men that I admire greatly. Ivan Rice, Rick Shaw and Gary Ball were selected in the inaugural year.
Thankful to the Lord for a good day full of blessings. Never expected to be standing at midcourt in Rupp Arena at 68, or any age for that matter.
LEXINGTON, Ky. – Jody Hamilton, whose remarkable 41-year high school baseball coaching career includes 1,038 victories, two state championships and National Coach of the Year recognition, is part of the Dawahares’ Kentucky High Schol Athletic Association 2026 Hall of Fame class.
Hamilton, a 1976 graduate of Ashland, won state championships at Boyd County in 2001 and West Jessamine in 2015. He also captured the All-A State title in 2024 at Owensboro Catholic and was the All-A runnerup at that school in 2025.
Hamilton was at Boyd County and West Jessamine for 16 years apiece and at Raceland for four years. This spring will be his fifth season at Owensboro Catholic,
He became only the fifth coach in Kentucky history to reach 1,000 victories, crossing that milestone in 2024. He is the only coach with state championships at two different schools.
The top four coaches on the Kentucky win list accomplished their 1,000-plus victories while coaching at the same school. All-time wins leader Mac Whitaker is still coaching at Harrison County and Bill Krumplebeck of Covington Catholic retired after last season.
Jody Hamilton with wife Denise after Owensboro Catholic captured the All-A state title in 2024.
Taking his place in the KHSAA Hall of Fame is an honor that is well deserved for one of the best high school baseball coaches in Kentucky history. He has helped countless players – his own and rivals alike – to college scholarships and was largely responsible for elevating baseball programs through the 16th Region during a dominating run there from 1987 to 2002.
Programs were forced to improve facilities and skills to try and keep pace with the Lions who were also state runnerups twice under Hamilton.
Hamilton, who is still the head coach at Owensboro Catholic, was the 2016 National High School Coaches Association Coach of the Year. He was a charter member in the Kentucky High School Coaches Hall of Fame, the 2016 NHSCA Coach of the Year and the Kentucky High School Baseball Coaches Association Coach of the Year in 2001 and 2015.
He was also a charter member of the Ashland Baseball CP-1 Hall of Fame in 2015 and is a member of the Morehead State Athletic Hall of Fame after an illustrious playing career that included being named Ohio Valley Conference Player of the Year after winning the league Triple Crown in 1977. His 49 career home run record stood until being eclipsed in 2024.
Jody played one year professionally for the Paintsville Yankees, including debuting the same night that Darryl Strawberry did for the Kingsport Mets.
Despite a successful first season in pro ball where he hit better than .300 with the prospects of moving up in the Yankee organization, he decided to embark on a coaching career that has been full of highlights. His career began as the head coach at Raceland High School in 1983. He later moved to Boyd County, then West Jessamine and is currently at Owensboro Catholic.
Jody Hamilton led West Jessamine to the 2015 state championship.
Hamilton coached golf from 2007-2010 where his teams were four-year regional champions and finished third at state in 2010 and seventh in 2009 at West Jessamine. He served as an assistant football coach at Raceland and West Jessamine in a career defined by success.
He endured only one losing season in his career, going 15-17 in his last year at Raceland in 1986 when every game was played on the road. Raceland won the district crown in ’86, anyway, and was the home team on the scoreboard for the first time — in 28 total games — in the opening round of the 16th Region Tournament.
Hamilton moved to Boyd County and captured his first of 11 region championship trophies with the Lions in 1988, taking them to the state championship game. Casey Hamilton, Jody’s son, helped bring Boyd County to a state title in 2001. He started at West Jessamine in 2004 and the Colts collected four region crowns (2008, ’10, ’15, ’16) under his leadership. He has two regional titles at Owensboro Catholic.
Winning the state championship and getting attention from college recruiters for his players was always the goal for Hamilton, who estimated 70 percent of the seniors who played for him found themselves on college rosters.
The secret sauce for Hamilton’s teams have been pitching and defense. All but “one or maybe two” of his starting catchers throughout his 41 seasons have gone on to play college baseball. Two of his pitchers at Boyd County, Jason Keyser and Casey Davis, were drafted in the eighth and ninth rounds, respectively. He has helped more than 125 players find a place to play in college.
Hamilton operated a baseball school while coaching at Boyd County and one of the pupils was Brandon Webb, a future Cy Young Award winner for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Webb was 10 when his father, Phil, took him to Hamilton. He worked with him for five years before telling him he had to stop because Webb would soon be pitching for Ashland, Boyd County’s biggest rival.
“I said, ‘Brandon, here’s what’s going to happen. I have to stop giving you lessons because, if I keep giving you lessons, you’re going to beat me. People aren’t going to like that. If I don’t keep giving you lessons, I’m going to recruit you, and then I’m going to get fired.’”
In an unusual twist, Webb never faced Boyd County as a Tomcat. Coaches held their top pitchers during the regular season for a potential district matchup. Ashland and Boyd County never drew in the first round through his junior year. Webb’s senior season was cut short by an injury.
“How many coaches can say they gave lessons to a Cy Young winner?” Hamilton asked.
Jody and wife, Denise, have two grown children and several grandchildren and live on a farm in the Owensboro area.
Curtis Crye, the 16th Region statistical guru, reminds us that February 17 is a night in area basketball history where points come out in bunches.
One game particularly stands out though and here is a column written a few years ago about that individual scoring battle that will likely never be matched.
Grayson and Fairview met late in the season with little on the line. Neither team was above .500, and neither was expected to make postseason noise.
But for one February night in 1967, none of that mattered.
Grayson’s Charles Baker and Fairview’s Jim Day staged one of the greatest scoring duels in 16th Region history. Baker poured in 55 points. Day answered with 51. Fairview won, 118-97.
The outburst capped a strange week for Baker, who had scored just eight total points in his previous two games, dropping his average below 20 for the first time all season. Against Coach George Cooke — the original “Wizard from Westwood” — in Fairview’s old gym, Baker couldn’t miss.
The tiny gym was packed, helped by the presence of University of Kentucky assistants Harry Lancaster and Joe B. Hall, there to watch Day play for Adolph Rupp.
“They weren’t coming to see me,” Baker said. “But there was a buzz in the crowd.”
There was plenty to buzz about. Baker and Day matched each other shot for shot in a relentless, up-and-down showcase. In the end, Fairview pulled away with 64 second-half points.
Steve Whitt added 23 and Roger Lemaster 14 for the Eagles. Everett Pennington scored 21 for Grayson, giving Baker the support he needed.
“Looking back, I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of guys,” Baker said of his teammates. “They’d say, ‘We need you to win.’ We still have a good relationship today.”
Grayson coach Dick Vincent understood scoring, too. He once had 67 points in a game for Hitchins — a school record.
Baker remembers being completely in rhythm.
“Looking back, it was what everybody calls being in the zone,” he said. “It was going in. Day would turn around and shoot it, then I’d come back on the other end. It was like a fast-moving picture.”
The game was physical — the teams combined for 79 free throws — and it came during an era built for scorers. Pistol Pete Maravich was lighting up college basketball at LSU, and Oscar Robertson had recently dropped 46 for the Cincinnati Royals.
Day, the area’s leading scorer that season, had already scored 60 in a win over Wurtland earlier that month, breaking Brice Thornbury’s record of 58. The 6-foot-9 standout finished with 23 field goals and 14 of 16 free throws in that game.
“Jim Day was a tremendous player,” Baker said. “He had great hands and touch. Just a natural shot.”
Day went on to an outstanding career at Morehead State, earning All-Ohio Valley Conference honors. Baker also played in college, shifting from scorer to facilitator at Rio Grande.
“I was an assist man and defense man,” he said. “If I wanted to start, I had to find my role. We already had All-American scorers.”
Some players struggled with that adjustment.
“They wondered why they weren’t playing,” Baker said. “I knew the secret — sometimes you have to adjust your role.”
In high school, though, both Baker and Day had one job: score. They were part of a region loaded with offensive talent in 1967, a season that featured multiple players averaging 20 or more points per game even though the 3-point shot was still 20 years away.
Late in the 1967 high school season, the top 10 scorers included Day (30.2), Louisa’s Herb Lemaster (22.9), Louisa’s Larry Edwards (21.1), Greenup’s Reece Stephenson (20.7), Hitchins’ Kevin Young (20.1), Raceland’s Mike Hewlett (20.0), Baker (19.6), Catlettsburg’s Roger Zornes (18.8), Boyd County’s Phillip Dowdy (18.1) and Blaine’s Roger Young (18.0).
Russell, which would go on to win the region, had five — Tookie Hilton (16.0), Roger Vanover (15.3), Tom Roberts (13.6), Lanny Miller (11.8) and Steve Radcliff (10.9) — scoring in double figures.
Ashland had four, led by Bob Lynch (17.9), Dan Owens (14.3), John Sieweke and Joe Conley (both 12.0).
Holy Family had four in double figures, too — John Layne (14.7), Tom Davis (13.2), Bucky Morris (12.5) and Maynard Thomas (12.1).
Dave Stultz was Greenup’s second-leading scorer at 12.
But on that February night, there were no better scorers in the 16th Region — and probably not in the state — than Jim Day and Charles Baker.
An Ashland native who cut his baseball teeth in his hometown was elected to the Kentucky Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame on Friday night.
Roger Robinson, a 1984 graduate of Ashland where he played for Frank Sloan, was recognized for building the Bethlehem baseball program for nearly 20 seasons. He has accumulated 327 victories despite being the smallest school in the Fifth Region. That’s an average of 20 wins per season in a program that, before his arrival, had only one district tournament victory.
He has changed the attitude and expectations for Bethlehem since taking over in 2007. That’s 18 seasons in 19 years with the COVID year included when no games were played. He starts season No. 20 in the spring.
Ashland native and Bethlehem High School coach Roger Robinson was inducted into the Kentucky High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame on Friday, Jan. 16, 2026.
Bethlehem, a private school, has a boy-girl enrollment of about 300 so his pool of players to choose from is around 150. Compare that with Central Hardin Elizabethtown and Taylor County who have enrollment in the thousands, and it has been an uphill battle, Robinson said.
However, he guided them to the regional championship game in 2013, falling to perennial power Elizabethtown 2-1. He was named Fifth Region Coach of the Year that season.
“That’s as close as we’ve been to winning the region but historically, we go to the region (since his arrival) every year,” said Robinson, who also credited longtime assistant Billy Lyons with the program’s success.
Robinson’s baseball knowledge comes through some good genes. His father, also named Roger Robinson, was a highly successful youth league baseball coach in Ashland for many years. He coached in Little League (major and minor), Babe Ruth and Senior Babe Ruth. The elder Robinson was on the ground floor of getting Babe Ruth baseball started in Ashland in the 1950s.
Roger played for his father throughout his youth career and said the experience was a great one.
“A couple of stories I can think about dad and baseball and the differences of then and now, back when he was coach, they got the practice field on first-come, first-serve basis,” he said. “He’d work the midnight shift at Armco, get off work at 6 a.m. and take the bat bag and put it on the diamond. We’d have early-morning practices.”
It was a baseball family for the Robinsons. Roger’s late mother, Margie, learned to keep the scorebook for her husband and his little sister, Jill, learned how to spend her free time at the ballpark, too.
When Roger Sr. was coaching Armco in the Senior Babe Ruth, Roger Dean was a batboy from 4 years old to 8, taking in the experience of being at the ballfield and around some elite Ashland players. Five decades later, the love of the game has not faded and he’s still on the ballfield.
He has translated that into a successful high school coaching career at Bethlehem. As a professional, he was a physical therapist until he retired. Now he helps with medical assistance for high school teams.
His wife, Cindy, attended private schools and they enrolled their four children at Bethlehem. Roger watched the team play when his boys were young and it wasn’t always pretty. He became an assistant coach and a year later was promoted to the head coach and the rest is history, including have both of his son play for him – like father, like son.
They have won the All “A” regional tournament four times.
“It was a start-from-nothing kind of process,” he said. “A lot of fundraising, an indoor facility and a much nicer field than they used to have made a difference. One of the things I’m most proud of is that we have a full varsity, junior varsity and freshmen teams. To have teams on all three levels for a school our size is tremendous.”
Robinson started the Bethlehem Prep Baseball Program that develops players from K-8th grade for students attending a Bethlehem feeder school.
In his speech on Friday, Robinson said it’s not all about wins and losses at Bethlehem.
“The biggest reason I got into coaching, and one of the things that drives me, and the person I thank most is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” he said. “I’m trying to represent the Lord when I’m out on that field. It’s what we try to do every time we play at Bethlehem. That is the reason I continue to coach.”
Hearing some of the other speeches about their playing days, Robinson said he once pitched a no-hitter as an 8-year-old on the Foodland Rockets that drew some laughs.
“What I didn’t tell them was I walked 17 and gave up 15 runs,” he said.
Roger played for the White Sox in Ashland American, the Eagles in Babe Ruth, the Tomcats in high school and for Post 76 under Frank Wagner and Paul Reeves.
Robinson thanked his father, his coach throughout his youth baseball days, for instilling in him a love for the game.
“He certainly doesn’t agree with all my philosophies, but that’s OK, he will learn,” Robinson said.
He also thanked his wife for putting up with him and always being supportive. Besides the four grown children, he also has seven grandboys so that means more coaching in his future.
“I had them in the (batting) cage yesterday,” he said.
MARK MY WORDS 2 