Former USC Women’s Athletics Administrator Barbara Hedges Named to Pac-12 Hall of Honor
March 04, 2020 | USC Athletics, Features
Barbara Hedges, who developed the USC women's athletics program during her 18-year tenure as a Trojan athletics administrator, has been named to the 2020 class of the Pac-12 Hall of Honor.
Formal induction will take place on March 13 during a ceremony prior to the semifinals of the 2020 Pac-12 Men's Basketball Tournament at Las Vegas' T-Mobile Arena.
Joining Hedges as 2020 inductees, one from each Pac-12 school, are Sean Rooks (Arizona), Melissa Belote Ripley (Arizona State), Don Bowden (California), Bill Marolt (Colorado), Dan Fouts (Oregon), Joni Huntley (Oregon State), Jennifer Azzi (Stanford), Jonathan Ogden (UCLA), Kathy Kreiner-Phillips (Utah), Lincoln Kennedy (Washington) and Jeanne Eggart Helfer (Washington State).
The 2020 Hall of Honor class will be the 19th since its creation in 2002, and the third to feature legendary figures from an array of sports after the Pac-12 expanded the field in 2018 from basketball-only to be inclusive of the broad-based athletics success across the Conference of Champions.
Hedges began her USC career as an associate athletic director in 1973, overseeing the Women of Troy to 13 national championships, then she became a senior associate A.D. in 1989. She added some men's sports under her supervision in 1985 (they won three national titles).
Her groundbreaking career continued when she became Washington's athletic director from 1991 to 2004. During that time, she was the National Association of Collegiate Athletic Directors' first female president in 1996-97 and the first woman on the National Football Foundation's Board of Directors in 1998. She also chaired numerous NCAA committees and presided over various national administrative organizations. A one-time gymnastics coach at Arizona, she was named to NACDA's Hall of Fame in 2009 and won NACDA's Corbett Award in 2010. She was inducted into the USC Athletic Hall of Fame in 2012.
She returned to USC from 2012 to 2016, first to serve as co-chair of the athletic department's Heritage Initiative fundraising effort, then she chaired the 2016 USC Athletic Hall of Fame ceremony.
