Former Vol Ellis highlights Hall of Fame class of 11

Former Tennessee basketball great Dale Ellis highlights a class of 11 to be inducted into the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame on Feb. 19 at the Renaissance Hotel in Nashville.

The class, which also includes former Sweetwater football star Bill Dupes, Knoxville native John R. Hall and former Vol football player Charlie Coffey, was announced Wednesday.

Ellis was a two-time All-American at Tennessee and led the Vols to the NCAA tournament four times. He was twice named SEC player of the year and was on the SEC Team of the 1980s. Ellis was selected ninth in the 1983 NBA draft by the Dallas Mavericks, but had his best years as a member of the Seattle Supersonics. He was voted the most improved player in 1986 and made the NBA all-star team in 1988-89.

He is third all-time in 3-point shots made with 1,719 and holds the NBA record for most minutes played in a game when he scored 53 points in 69 minutes.

Dupes was a standout high school player at Sweetwater and Tennessee Military Institute. He played at Tennessee Tech, where he was a three-year-starter and team captain his senior year. He later coached at Tennessee Tech and Austin Peay, where he was named OVC Coach of the Year in 1964. He later coached at Sweetwater High School and led the team to the 1993 state championship. He retired from coaching in 1998 after a 44-year career.

Hall, an all-state guard while at Knoxville High, will receive a Lifetime Achievement induction. He was an Academic All-American at Vanderbilt in 1954 and co-captained the football team. After graduation he joined Ashland Oil in 1957 and rose to chairman and chief executive officer in 1981. He retired in 1997 and has served as a trustee for Vanderbilt since 1987.

Coffey is a Shelbyville native who played guard for General Robert R. Neyland at Tennessee (1953-55), where he captained the 1955 team. He had the highest grade-point average of any football player on the team. His coaching career had numerous stops, finishing with a stint as head coach of Virginia Tech, where his wide-open offense built the team's popularity with fans. Coffey then entered the trucking business and founded the Nationwide Express Trucking Company in Shelbyville.

Other inductees are former East Tennessee State basketball great Harley "Skeeter" Swift; Alabama football standout E.J. Junior, who grew up in Nashville; former baseball coach and Middle Tennessee State athletic director John Stanford, once a stellar pitcher with the Blue Raiders' baseball team; former Mississippi State quarterback and coach Rocky Felker, who grew up in Jackson; the late Norman "Turkey" Stearnes, a Negro League baseball star who was born in Nashville; Lin Dunn, a UT Martin graduate who coached the Indiana Fever to the WNBA finals this past season and formerly coached at Purdue, Miami and Austin Peay; and the late Ted Rhodes, a trailblazing black golfer.