Lucas Bateman has had a change of heart; he will not be playing football in college.
Instead Bateman, a prep all-stater in football and track, will join fellow all-state Waynesville High School Tiger trackster Sam Scott in attending Arkansas State University and joining the Indian track and field squad.
Back in February Bateman had signed a national letter of intent to play football at Central Missouri University. He said he has been released from his Central Missouri obligations and can join the A-State track program for the 2008-09 school year.
Arkansas State is a NCAA Division I school out of Jonesboro, Ark.
Both Scott and Bateman have signed national letters of intent at Arkansas State.
Scott and Bateman were major cogs in the Waynesville boys’ track team’s splendid 2008 season, during which the Tigers finished fourth as a team in the Missouri Class 4 Track and Field Championships.
Scott gained all-state in all four of his events at the ’08 state meet. He was third in the open 200-meter dash with a time of :21.81; fourth in the open 400-mter dash at :48.99; ran the anchor leg on the 4,200-meter relay team, which placed third at 1:28.23, and also competed on the 4x400-meter relay team, which placed eighth at state with a time of 3:21.18. Scott holds the WHS 200-meter school record, breaking the mark previously held by Orlando Slider, who went on to compete in Division I track at Oklahoma University.
Bateman captured all-state honors in the 300-meter hurdles for the second consecutive season, breaking his own school mark in the event. At the state meet Bateman finished third in the 300-hurdles for the second consecutive year in ’08 while also winning all-state honors in the 110-meter hurdles with an eighth-place finish.
—-
Some Coaches!
Wow! No wonder the Sellers-Sexton men’s basketball team successfully defended its Missouri Senior Olympic state championship recently. Look at the college coaching some of its players received!
Members of the Sellers-Sexton Senior Olympic squad include John Brown, Terry Bozzay, Larry Sexton, Charles Pace, Randy Noll, Mike Gyovai and Steve Hauck.
Brown, of course, was an All-America collegiate player from Mizzou who went on to be a first-round draft pick in the NBA. His M.U. coach was legendary Norm Stewart, one of the winningest and most-respected coaches in collegiate basketball history.
Noll, who has a son currently on the roster of the Missouri S&T men’s basketball team, himself played at the University of Kentucky under another coaching legend, Adolph Rupp.
And Gyovai has been highly publicized as perhaps the favorite player ever coached by yet another legend, Bob Knight. Gyovai played for Knight when the two were at Army. Knight devoted several pages of his autobiography to Gyovai, explaining how he admired Gyovai’s personality both on and off the court.
- —
