About Inductee

Along with Yvonne Terry Betowt of The Huntsville Times, Peggy Hays was one of the pioneer women sports journalists in the Tennessee Valley. A nurse by profession, Peggy has been an assistant professor of the College of Nursing at the University of Alabama in Huntsville since 1997. But she is also remembered as one of the few womens sports columnists in the South in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. She began her writing career at The Huntsville News and moved over in 1979 to The Times, where she began a weekly womens sports column, a newly created position. Over the next decade, the registered nurse, housewife, ex-skydiver and accomplished basketball and volleyball player covered a wide variety of sports involving girls and women. She wrote from a womans perspective about the inequalities for girls sports throughout the region and the state, and she wrote with equal expertise about such topics as the remarkable rise of the womens basketball team at the University of Tennessee under Pat Summit. A gifted athlete herself, Peggy was a star softball player in Illinois, Colorado and later in Huntsville, where she played on the Alabama State Championship Womens Fast-Pitch team in 1970. She also played on Decaturs State Softball Championship team in 1974-75 and played on championship basketball, volleyball and bowling teams in the 1970s. At the same time, she was coaching YMCA teams in various sports. She was also a long time member of the North Alabama Basketball Officials Association, retiring in 2001 after calling both boys and girls high school and middle school basketball games for more than 30 years.