Running back Dana Brinson entered the Hall of Fame on his mother’s birthday. Brinson went on to play for Tom Osborne’s Nebraska Cornhuskers, and later the San Diego Chargers, but being a three-year starter for the Wildcats remains a big deal to him.

“My time with the Wildcats were some of the best years of my life,” Brinson said. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

One of the greatest female athletes in Valdosta history was basketball star Libby Carter Deavours. Deavours, described as a “deadly left-handed shooter,” still holds the school record with 45 points in a game, and scored 1,577 points in her career, an average of 25 a game. She led the Lady Wildcats to the 1957 state championship.

Deavours recalled beating Jeff Davis for the state championship, and the night she scored 42 points against Nashville, whose leading scorer had 58. She recently sat down and looked through her old scrapbook, and, “I realized I was pretty good.”

“For that wonderful trip down memory lane, thank you,” Deavours said.

Deavours was one of five inductees to join their fathers in the Valdosta Sports Hall of Fame. The plaques of the five second-generation Hall of Famers (Deavours, Lisa Jones Thomas, O’Neal, John Lastinger and Coleman Rudolph) have each been hung up next to their fathers’ plaques in the museum at Cleveland Field.

“My father was so nervous when he stood up here (in 1978),” Deavours said. “I’m as nervous as my father was when he went in. When I found out I was chosen for the Hall of Fame, I was speechless, delighted and grateful.”

Alton Hitson’s legacy will always be as the quarterback that won back-to-back state championships for Valdosta in 1989 and 1990, and as a winner, having gone 27-1-1 as a starter. He went on to play for Georgia Southern.

“I want to say thank you to the coaches,” Hitson said. “Coaches like (Al) Akins toughened me up for football, and for life.”

Lastinger was another quarterback with a reputation for being a winner, both at Valdosta, where he was the quarterback of Nick Hyder’s first state championship team in 1978, and at Georgia, where he led the Bulldogs to the Sugar Bowl and the Cotton Bowl in his two seasons as a starter. He realized how special it was to be a Valdosta Wildcat when he got to UGA.

“At Georgia, teammates would ask me about playing for Valdosta High School,” Lastinger recalled. “You realized this is a special place.

“Sports like football and baseball are team sports. I was so fortunate to play with all of these teammates.”

Paul McNeal was a starting lineman on three state championship teams and a state runner-up in four years with the Wildcats. He and fellow inductees Willie Webb and John Robert O’Neal were stars on coach Wright Bazemore’s 1950-53 Valdosta football teams. McNeal recalled how great those years were. Then he praised the 2007 Valdosta team for its vast improvement this season.

“Ladies and gentlemen, don’t give up on those Wildcats,” he said, to much applause.

Keith Middleton has given much of his life to Valdosta High football. Middleton played four years at linebacker for the Wildcats, before joining Belue and Lastinger on the 1980 national champion Georgia Bulldogs. Then in the late 1980’s, he returned to his alma mater as an assistant coach, and has spent almost 20 years there.