NATCHITOCHES – The Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2025 has expanded to 12 with the announcement Wednesday that retired football coach Nick Saban, who led LSU to a 2003 national championship, will be enshrined this summer.
Saban was elected to the LSHOF’s Class of 2020, but the global pandemic that spring postponed that year’s ceremonies. It also altered the NCAA football recruiting calendar, and that shift prevented Saban, then coach at Alabama, from being inducted until now at the Hall’s annual June ceremonies, set this year for June 26-28 in Natchitoches.
The announcement was made by Ronnie Rantz, CEO/President of the LSHOF Foundation, which hosts the annual induction activities, and LSHOF chairman Doug Ireland. The other members of the class were announced last fall.
Saban has close connections with four other 2025 inductees – Andrew Whitworth, Herb Vincent, Glenn Guilbeau, and the late Ed Daniels, all whom were involved with Saban during his time at LSU.
Whitworth was a star on the Tigers’ national championship team. Vincent was LSU’s lead sports publicist and the primary media contact for Saban and the football program, while Guilbeau and Daniels covered that team and other Saban-led squads at LSU and Alabama.
Whitworth, a champion at West Monroe High School, LSU and in the NFL during a 16-year pro career, is joined by pro basketball All-Stars Danny Granger and Vickie Johnson, the state’s winningest all-time college baseball coach Joe Scheuermann and Danny Broussard, one of the nation’s most successful high school basketball coaches, in this year’s induction class.
It also includes LSU gymnastics great and NCAA individual champion April Burkholder, transformational Catholic-Baton Rouge high school football coach Dale Weiner and George “Bobby” Soileau, an NCAA boxing champion at LSU who also won a state crown as a football coach at his alma mater, Sacred Heart High School in Ville Platte.
LSU graduate Vincent, now a longstanding associate commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, is receiving the Hall’s Dave Dixon Louisiana Sports Leadership Award with his enshrinement. Daniels was a generational television sports broadcaster in New Orleans, and Guilbeau is one of the nation’s more decorated sportswriters in a career that has seen him cover LSU, state college, high school and pro sports along with stories across the South and around the SEC. They are being inducted as recipients of the Louisiana Sports Writers Association’s Distinguished Service Award in Sports Journalism.
The new class will be enshrined June 28 at the Natchitoches Events Center to culminate the 66th Induction Celebration. Three days and nights of festivities begin Thursday, June 26 with seven events, three with free access. More information is available at LaSportsHall.com or by calling the LSHOF Foundation office at 318-238-4255.
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