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Final Four Heroes Laettner and Wicks Head Eight Inductees

KANSAS CITY, MO - Duke University's Christian Laettner and Sidney Wicks of UCLA, both of whom paced their schools to multiple NCAA® championships, are among eight individuals announced today to be enshrined in the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

The 2010 induction ceremonies will be held on Sunday, November 21, 2010, at the College Basketball Experience (CBE) and the historic Midland Theatre in Kansas City, Mo. The CBE, a world-class entertainment facility that provides a multi-faceted interactive experience for fans, shares a common lobby with Sprint Center and is the home of the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

Wicks helped Coach John Wooden's UCLA Bruins to three straight NCAA championships from 1969-71. He was selected as the tournament's most outstanding player as a junior in 1970 and earned at least one national player of the year award in each of his last two seasons.

Laettner will always be remembered for his last-minute heroics to win NCAA tournament games, but it was his consistent performance over four seasons that led the Blue Devils to four consecutive Final Four berths. Coach Mike Krzyzewski's team won the NCAA championship in Laettner's junior and senior seasons and he captured just about every honor possible in the Atlantic Coast Conference and the NCAA, including national player of the year in 1992.

The 2010 induction class also includes coaches Tex Winter, the innovator of the triangle offense who coached at Marquette, Kansas State, Northwestern, Washington and Long Beach State; and Davey Whitney, with more than 500 career wins in a long career at Alcorn State, including taking one of the first teams from a historically black university to the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) in 1979.

Two men whose work has been instrumental in the tremendous growth and popularity of the NCAA championship tournament, NCAA Executive Vice President Tom Jernstedt and Wayne Duke, former commissioner of the Big Eight and Big Ten conferences, will be inducted as contributors. Over his 38 years with the NCAA, Jernstedt has held a variety of positions, but really left his mark on men's basketball, nurturing the tournament and Final Four into one of the greatest events in all of sports. Duke was the NCAA's assistant executive director for 11 years before spending eight with the Big Eight and 18 with the Big Ten. He was chair of the NCAA Men's Basketball Committee for four years and championed allowing more than one team from a conference into the NCAA tournament.

Jerry West and David Thompson, two of basketball's all-time brightest stars, will be recognized as members of the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame's founding class. Inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1980, West was a three-time All-America at West Virginia and led the Mountaineers to the NCAA championship game. He was co-captain of the 1960 U.S. Olympic gold medal team, a 14-time NBA all-star and the league's most valuable player in 1972.

Thompson was a three-time All-America and two-time national player of the year. He led North Carolina State to the 1974 NCAA Championship, was a three-time ACC player of the year and the national player of the year in his final two seasons. Thompson was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame in 1996.

The founding class of the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame includes all of the coaches, players and contributors with roots in college basketball inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., prior to 2006.

Complete Release on 2010 National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame Inductees in PDF Format