Rick Cleveland has been named Mississippi Sportswriter of the Year — an honor he achieved for the 10th time — by the National Sports Media Foundation.
Cleveland became a full time sports columnist for Mississippi Today last August after writing occasional columns for the publication while serving as executive director and historian of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame.
Cleveland also writes a weekly sports column that is distributed to state newspapers through the Mississippi Press Association and columns for the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame.
The Mississippi Sportscaster of the Year is David Kellum of the Ole Miss Radio Network in Oxford, the NSMA said.
The honorees are selected through voting done by sports writers and sportscasters in each state.
Cleveland was first honored as Mississippi Sportswriter of the Year in 1975 when he was 22 years old and the deputy sports editor of the Hattiesburg American.
In a press release, the National Sports Media Foundation noted that among this year’s honorees, seven have been honored at least 10 times in their state and one other has been honored nine times in one state and five times in another state for a total of 14.
New inductees into the National Sports Media Association Hall of Fame include ESPN’s Linda Cohn, the late Frank Gifford, who moved from the sports field to the broadcast booth with CBS and ABC, New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica and the late Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American.
The new Hall of Fame members and the state award winners will be honored at the NSMA Awards Weekend, June 25-26 in Winston-Salem, N.C.
•••
Rick Cleveland is Mississippi Today’s sports columnist. Read his columns and his Sports Daily blog. Reach Rick at rcleveland@mississippitoday.org.
Check out other news at mississippitoday.org and follows us on Twitter @MSTODAYnews.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.