On a Saturday morning in Morgantown, before the tailgates fill and the marching band warms up, West Virginia University will do something it has done only 35 times before. At 9 a.m. on October 10, inside the Caperton Indoor Practice Facility, seven new names will be added to the WVU Sports Hall of Fame — and with them, the roll call will cross a threshold: 250 inductees in the hall's history.
The ceremony is free and open to the public, a rarity in big-time college athletics, where hall-of-fame enshrinements are often ticketed, black-tie affairs. Here, anyone can walk into the cavernous indoor practice building and watch the plaques change hands. It happens just hours before the Mountaineers host Arizona at Milan Puskar Stadium, meaning the morning belongs to the past and the afternoon to the present.
The class of 2026 is headlined by John Beilein, the men's basketball coach who arrived in 2002 to revive a program that had sagged through four disappointing seasons at the end of Gale Catlett's tenure. Beilein's first year was a struggle — 14-15 — and his second only marginally better at 17-14. Then came the run that made him a Mountaineer legend: 73 wins across the next three seasons, an NCAA Elite Eight in 2005 (the program's first in 42 years), a Sweet 16 in 2006, and the 2007 NIT championship, won at Madison Square Garden after a buzzer-beater against Mississippi State and a title-game win over Clemson. It was WVU's first NIT crown since 1942. Beilein left Morgantown with a 104-60 record in five seasons, the fifth-winningest coach in program history, behind only Catlett, Bob Huggins, Francis Stadsvold and Fred Schaus. He went on to coach at Michigan and in the NBA, but the foundation of that rise was laid in the hills of West Virginia.
If Beilein is the headliner, the heart of this class may be two women who played together in the Old Gold and Blue and then together for Canada. Kadeisha Buchanan and Ashley Lawrence, both Toronto natives, each appeared 91 times for the Mountaineer women's soccer team between 2013 and 2016. Buchanan, a centre-back, became one of the most decorated defenders in college soccer history, winning the 2016 MAC Hermann Trophy — the sport's version of the Heisman — as the nation's outstanding player. Lawrence, a midfielder and defender, scored 17 goals in her WVU career and has since earned more than 150 caps for the Canadian national team. Both went on to star in Europe: Buchanan for Lyon and later Chelsea, Lawrence for Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and now OL Lyonnes. Their shared induction is a reminder of how much of WVU's modern athletic identity was built by players who grew up north of the border.
Dennis Fowlkes represents the football program's blue-collar past. A linebacker from Columbus, Ohio, Fowlkes played from 1979 to 1982 and piled up 459 tackles — 286 of them solo — along with 18 tackles for loss, nine sacks, seven interceptions and four forced fumbles. After a 57-tackle freshman season, he posted three consecutive years of 100-plus stops, a model of durability in an era when the Mountaineers were grinding through a tough independent schedule.
Bria Holmes, a shooting guard from New Haven, Connecticut, starred for WVU women's basketball from 2012 to 2016 and was drafted 11th overall by the Atlanta Dream in the 2016 WNBA draft — the fifth Mountaineer ever selected. She went on to play for the Connecticut Sun, Los Angeles Sparks and Las Vegas Aces.
Craig Turnbull's induction honors a coach who built something from almost nothing. The winningest coach in West Virginia wrestling history, Turnbull led the program for a record-tying 35 years, from 1979 to 2014, taking it from modest beginnings to national prominence. Alex Kasich rounds out the class as a standout in men's cross country and indoor and outdoor track and field.
The setting itself carries history. The Caperton Indoor Practice Facility was dedicated in August 1998 and named for former Governor Gaston Caperton. It was a project pushed hard by longtime football coach Don Nehlen, who worked to make the $9 million structure a reality; final approval came in June 1997 and construction began weeks later. The building was the first of its kind for a state university to use the "design-build" concept, with architects and engineers working together under a single bid. Inside is a 90-yard FieldTurf surface with a seven-yard safety zone, more than 75,000 square feet of practice room, skylights for natural light, and a netting system flexible enough to accommodate soccer and baseball as well as football. It sits adjacent to the Puskar Center and Mountaineer Field.
The Hall of Fame itself dates to 1991, when WVU established the honor to recognize former student-athletes, coaches and administrators. Under the university's rules, candidates become eligible for selection 10 years after their association with WVU athletics ends — a waiting period that gives inductions like this one a retrospective weight. The 36th class arriving at 250 total inductees is a milestone that speaks to more than a century of Mountaineer competition, from the earliest days of the program to the professional era.
For those who attend, the morning offers something increasingly rare in college sports: a chance to see the past honored without a ticket, in a building built for the present, on a campus where the two are never far apart. The ceremony begins at 9 a.m. and the public is invited. By the time it ends, the football team will be warming up, the lots will be filling, and 250 names will have become 257 — a number that will keep climbing, one autumn Saturday at a time.