 Our final inductee is Dr. Kevin Manning. Dr. Manning has served as president of Stevenson University since 2000 and has announced he will be retiring following this academic year. His support of Mustang Athletics has resulted in expansion to 27 varsity sports and Stevenson becoming a leader in NCAA Division III, including a national championship in Men's Lacrosse in 2013. Dr. Manning has been a staple on the sidelines from day one, but he's not just been a fan where he's cheering on the sidelines. He's been instrumental in the campus, the buildings, everything that you see here. The stadium, the gymnasium, the future plans for Rosewood, the future plans for Owings Mills North, and the future of our growth in the athletics, not just growth for overall enrollment, but growth for the institutional values, institutional experience on campus and everything from football and homecoming and open house, the Hall of Fame, all under our president's direction. The category that Dr. Manning is going into, the Hall of Fame, is a special category created by the Hall of Fame Committee and it's a very unique category. It's a very rare category. It's called an emeritus category. Now, emeritus in higher education means a faculty member who is retiring or in this case a board member or president who has made major impacts at the institution and the major impacts he's made in athletics has been tremendous. The emeritus category, which is unique, is the highest honor of the Hall of Fame and is deserving and President Manning has been synonymous with the growth of the institution and very much synonymous with the growth of the athletic department. There is no president that I've ever experienced on all the college campuses that I've visited, both as a coach or administrator that is engaged at the grassroots level with our students. He encourages them to pursue excellence. He is very engaged in helping them learn new values, new techniques, new strategies. He understands how to build the community together. Victory or Mustang, that is a staple of our success, was certainly President Manning's idea, which also tied together community and to wrap all of these four core values that he introduced to our university is the one that I see in him every day and that is excellence. His portrayal of excellence and his expectation of excellence for everybody on campus, including athletics, it's so prevalent in every time you see him and every time you work with him or he asks you to work with him. It's tremendous. Dr. Manning took a special interest in our teams in showing what he had learned about sports psychology and you'll see some affectionate terms that we will use in our perpetuity of the 12-foot Mustang and to be 12 feet tall. Victory is 12 feet tall. Our stories and those athletes who know the help that he's given, which he introduces the 12-foot Mustang and the 12-foot belief in each of our athletes to approach the game in that way, that's the involvement that he's had and he did it at a personal level. I know the athletes that I've worked with both in coaching basketball and the national championship team cherish that involvement and so we believe in 12 feet tall as Stevenson and President Manning is 12 feet tall. It is my honor to welcome Dr. Kevin Manning into the Dick Watts Athletics Hall of Fame. Thank you very much and I'm really honored. I'm going to introduce my wife Sarah who's here and my three kids Elizabeth and Megan and Kevin Jr. and then my two grandkids Jake over here with the bow tie and Emma and my son-in-law Harry from Philadelphia so welcome. Thank you for coming. I'm a little reluctant to do this but I am dedicating this talk tonight to all of you, all of the athletes that are here this evening. This is really not about me but I thought it would be meaningful to you if I did this so I'm going to kind of see if I can take the entire time to give the talk and if I can I'll kind of abbreviate it. In his speech what it takes to be number one, Vince LaBarde says every time a football player goes to play his trade he's got to play from the ground up. From the soles of his feet right up to his head every inch of him has to play. Some guys play with their heads that's okay. You've got to be smart to be number one in any business but more importantly you've got to play with your heart with every fiber of your body. If you're lucky enough to find a guy with a lot of head and a lot of heart he's never going to come off the field second. I stand here tonight with my fellow inductees and I am humbled. You've played your game with the soles of your feet. You've played with your heads. You've played with your hearts. I don't consider myself to be an athlete and I'm certainly not a Mustang athlete but I am the Mustang's biggest fan. Vince LaBarde is one of the most recognized names in the history of American sports. A football player himself before turning to coaching in the 1960s he led the Green Bay Packers to three straight and five total NFL championships in seven years. He certainly knew what it took to be successful. It strikes me that much of what LaBarde said can be tied to Stevenson's core values of community excellence, integrity and learning. Furthermore we can reaffirm our values by looking at how they are played on our athletic fields. First community, LaBarde said people who work together will win whether it be against complex football defenses or the problems of modern society. Stevenson values community. We embrace our common bonds and respect our individual and cultural differences. Sports allows for teamwork and competition with and between people and groups of people who might otherwise have nothing to do with each other. Think about your teammates. Did you grow up together, study the same major? Your greatest common bond was probably your love of the sport. Thus you performed as a team, as a community, to achieve success and those skills carry over to life. As LaBarde stated, when we work together society wins. The second value excellence, excellence we salute superior performance while recognizing the importance of tenacity. LaBarde said perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence. Tracy, Holly, Fran, Anthony, Wade, Peter, Adrian, the members of the 2005 six men's basketball team, you're being honored tonight because you seized excellence. You epitomize excellence and I hope you've found that your relentless drive to achieve perfection well that Stevenson has carried out to career and life success today. And next integrity, when talking about winning, LaBarde said winning is not something it is an all the time thing. You don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. And that's what integrity means to me. Integrity is doing things right all the time. At Stevenson we expect this kind of behavior. We expect members of our community to act with dignity and honesty. Let's not forget our characters are built on what we do in the dark when no one is watching. As integrity relates to athletics, we don't skip practices because our bodies are aching. We don't yell at officials when the calls go against us. We remember our drills and our coaching when the games get tough. We respect our opponents. We stand tall. And when we do do these things, we win. Even when the scoreboard doesn't reflect that, we win. And finally our last value is learning. We promote the pursuit of knowledge while encouraging a life well lived. I've been really pleased by the academic performance of students here at Stevenson University. And despite the countless hours devoted to practice and competition our student athletes achieve academic success at the same level as our student population as a whole. Stevenson students athletes maintain just over a B average which I think is impressive. I want to particularly applaud our female athletes when looking at the academic standings of our teams for the fall of 14 the seven teams with the highest overall GPAs and eight of the top 10 were women's teams. However this pursuit of knowledge doesn't just happen in the classroom. I wouldn't be surprised if many of you said you learned some of your most valuable life lessons by being a member of an athletic team. For example, you knew your place on the team and that may have helped you understand your role for your employer. Accountability to your team and accountability to your team matter as does accountability to your family and boss today. You learn the importance of hard work and your work ethic counts today. And finally you learn the value of perseverance. Which takes me back to Coach Lombardi who reminds us it's not whether we get knocked down but it's whether we get back up again. And I'll add whether you learn from your mistakes whether you persist. This is a bittersweet year for me. I have less than eight months left to serve as president of this fine institution and being your president has been my greatest privilege and honor. It has brought me joy. It has also brought me frustration and challenges to be sure but my overarching emotions are joy and pride. It's been an honor to be the president of Stevenson. That the Hall of Fame Committee chose to recognize me with inclusion in the 2016 Hall of Fame is a tremendous honor and means more to me than you could possibly express. My thanks go out to the members of the committee but my greater thanks are directed to every member of every team who has worn a Villa Giulia or Stevenson uniform. You've helped create an institution people want to support to cheer for, to be proud of. And I thank you for that. I leave you with this final last thought from Vince Lombardi. If you'll not settle for anything less than your best you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish in your lives. Thank you very much.