Miami Herald continues to honor best high school athletes, but ceremony will come to an end
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Star Power in South Florida
The Miami Herald has a rich tradition of honoring the best in South Florida high school sports.
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Change is a strange thing.
In general terms, there is change for the good and change for the bad.
However, used in any manner, “change” is an elusive word.
Probably the best description of the word is offered by a philosopher who rightfully pointed out: “Change is the only constant.”
That said, change has come to the long-existing tradition of honoring of All-Dade and All-Broward high school athletes starting with this year.
It will not be a startling change, and hopefully it will be a good change.
After 65 years of honoring the best of the best, the Miami Herald is ending its run of Athletic Awards ceremonies in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
But while the annual late-spring gathering won’t take place this May, the Herald will continue to honor the best South Florida has to offer as we include our Players and Coaches of the Year winners with our All-County sections starting with the fall sports edition released Wednesday. The Herald will also have video interviews with the winners for the first time to highlight their accomplishments. And this will continue with the winter sports and spring sports sections later this year.
With these changes in the offing, it seems like a proper time to take a look back at the history of honoring the finest athletes from Dade and Broward counties.
The All-Dade and All-Broward teams have offered accolades to literally thousands and thousands of athletes during the years, and that number will continue to grow.
A LONG-STANDING LEGACY IS FOUNDED
In 1957, the first All-Dade teams were named and the first Athlete of the Year was selected. Miami High’s Claude Moorman earned that initial Athlete of the Year honor. That was the start of something that just got bigger and bigger.
Was Moorman a good pick? Very much so. At Miami High, he was president of the student body and a football star. At Duke, as a receiver, he led the Blue Devils to the ACC title in 1960 and was named an All-American and also earned his medical degree. He then served in Vietnam as a doctor. Later, he added a law degree.
In 2009, Moorman died and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
In 1965, the Herald began honoring Broward County athletes, as well.
Pompano Beach swimmer John Nelson, who as a 16-year-old in high school captured a silver medal in the 1,500-meter freestyle at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, became the Herald’s first Broward Athlete of the Year in 1965. Nelson went on to attend Yale and won a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City as part of the United States’ 800-meter freestyle relay, which included American swimming legend Mark Spitz.
A FUTURE LEGEND BREAKS A BARRIER
The Herald, starting with that first ceremony in 1957, would only award one Athlete of the Year regardless of gender.
For the first 15 years of combined ceremonies in Dade and Broward, the winners had always been male athletes.
That was until 1972 when Chris Evert of Fort Lauderdale St. Thomas Aquinas became the first Female Athlete of the Year. Evert would become a tennis legend, Hall of Famer and 18-time Grand Slam singles champion.
Clearly, a great choice.
It took a little longer for the trend to change in Dade.
But in 1979, Coral Gables’ Sandra Wells, a two-time All-Dade point guard, volleyball standout and catcher on the Cavaliers’ softball team became the Herald’s first Female Athlete of the Year in the county.
Wells went on to earn a master’s degree at the University of Miami and became an ordained minister.
It would be another 15 years in Dade and 17 years in Broward before the Herald would rightfully split the award into male and female categories and expand it to include categories for large and small schools.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
In 1957, the first Miami-Dade Awards banquet would be held … although it wasn’t much of an event.
Early on, at the first few All-Dade ceremonies, there were about a total of 45 athletes honored. The crowd was roughly 65 or so if some parents and coaches attending were included.
The All-Dade banquet went from being held at its original venue at the Miami Springs Villas in the early days to the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts in Downtown Miami — now known as the Olympia Theater — where it was held as a gala dinner.
Eventually the Herald went back to hosting the event as a breakfast at what used to be the Radisson Hotel near Miami International Airport.
Student-athletes and coaches got together, dressed formally and were honored on stage before their peers in an Academy Awards-like setting.
Starting in 1974, the Athlete of the Year received a very unique trophy, made by Robert Stoetzer. It was more a work of art than a trophy. The Herald paid around $600 each year for the trophy, a testament to its uniqueness.
As the years went by, the trophies got smaller, but more abundant as more schools opened and greater numbers of athletes were honored.
BROWARD BEGINS
The Herald began hosting an All-Broward ceremony formally in 1993 at an event that drew a reported crowd of 630 to the Pier 66 Resort and Marina in Fort Lauderdale.
Attendance reached capacity quickly as people kept showing up in a year in which St. Thomas Aquinas swept the two major awards with Athlete of the Year honors going to former middle linebacker and state championship wrestler Terry Smith and then-Aquinas football coach and athletic director George Smith winning the first of his five overall Coach of the Year awards.
Clearly, a bigger venue was needed.
For the next few years, the ceremony would be held at the Broward County Convention Center before it would find a home at Signature Grand in Davie.
Through the years, the Broward ceremony, as well as the Dade, hired entertainment for the ceremonies.
One year, Broward’s entertainment was an old-time rock ‘n’ roll band. And they were good.
Nobody expected how good they would be. They did a fairly long set of songs and midway through the second song people started getting up from their dinner tables and began dancing to the music.
The banquet room looked like a scene from the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
In recent years before the COVID-19 pandemic, the attendance for a normal All-Dade — with parents, coaches and athletes — was often more than 1,400. One year, with the ceremonies being held at Jungle Island, the fire marshal threatened to shut the ceremonies down just before they were scheduled to start. The solution was some parents and coaches were forced to sit outside in the hallways craning their necks to hear and see the goings-on.
When the fire marshal was gone, they sneaked back in.
Unfortunately, the onset of the pandemic was the beginning of the end, with the Herald limited to recording a pair of virtual ceremonies in 2020 and 2021 due to safety concerns.
THE TRADITION LIVES ON
Through more than six decades, the Herald honored a who’s who of stellar athletes in 17 different sports that included legends such as Frank Gore, Dalvin Cook, Tim James, Sedrick Irvin, Sylvia Fowles, Missy Penna, Michael Timpson and many more in Dade as well as Evert, Michael Irvin, Mitch Richmond, Tyrone Moss, Errict Rhett, Danny Kanell, Octavia Blue, Seilala and Claire Sua and Sanya Richards just to name a few in Broward.
Legendary sports figures such as famed Olympian Jesse Owens, the late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and Irvin were among some of the most notable guest speakers in ceremonies past.
Figures such as Smith and others who made a lasting impact on the high school community were also honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Sometimes, the honor left even the most even-keeled coaches such as the late Dillard girls’ basketball icon Marcia Pinder, a Hall of Famer who won nearly 1,000 games during her coaching career, in tears when she was presented the Lifetime Award in 2014.
There was also recognition of school success with none more so than St. Thomas Aquinas’ ongoing streak of winning the Herald’s All-Sports Trophy in Broward bestowed upon the most dominant overall program in the county. The streak hit 40 years last May and started an annual tradition where athletes, coaches and faculty of the winning school gathered on stage after the event concluded for a team picture. Aquinas maintained its annual appointment until the final in-person banquet in 2019.
The Herald also made sure to honor remarkable stories that go beyond sports with the Herald’s Leo Suarez/Walter Krietsch Courage Awards. The award honored those two former Herald editors who passed away far too early and have since been bestowed upon members of the high school sports community who exhibited extraordinary courage in the face of adversity.
A recent example of those honors includes the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High athletic program, which was recognized for its resilience following the tragic shooting that occurred at the Parkland school in February 2018.
These traditions will now take a different form without the annual gathering.
But the Herald will continue to honor the remarkable individuals in both Dade and Broward as it has since it began with Moorman and Nelson all those years ago.
This story was originally published January 26, 2022 at 7:02 AM.
