EAST LANSING ~ Six former Spartan athletes and one championship coach were inducted into the Michigan State Athletics Hall of Fame on Friday. The inductees are record holders and history makers that represent over 60 years of Spartan champions.
Sue Latter-Addison is a pioneer in women’s sports. With no girls track team at Clarkston High School in the early 1970s, she trained with the boys before winning state titles at Michigan’s first girls high school meet. She went on to claim six Big Ten championships for MSU and set an AAU record of 2:03.75 in the 800 meters that still stands today. “I hoped I paved the way for others to follow,” she said during her induction speech.
Her legacy echoes through the careers of Lindsay Bowen and Leah O’Connor‑Falland, the two other women in this year’s class. Bowen helped lead the women’s basketball team to the Final Four for the first time in school history in 2005 with 1,739 career points. O’Connor-Falland holds over a dozen Big Ten titles and three national titles in women’s track and field.
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(CONTINUED) The class also features standout football talent in Dan Currie, a consensus All‑American linebacker from MSU’s 1957 national championship team, and Tico Duckett, who rushed for more than 3,000 career yards and helped anchor the Spartans’ offense in the early 1990s. Kalin Lucas, the 2009 Big Ten Player of the Year, remains one of MSU basketball’s most dynamic point guards, and Walt Drenth guided the Spartans to multiple NCAA appearances during his 16‑year coaching tenure of the men’s and women’s track & field and cross country programs.
The inductees are cemented in Spartan history alongside 193 fellow decorated athletes in the Clara Bell Smith Student-Athlete Academics Center in East Lansing.
