Fort Wayne Sports Players: The Athletes the Record Ties to the City

Sports Players · The names Fort Wayne can claim, and how it claims them

Every city keeps a list like this one in its head, and most lists are built on rumour: a star once passed through, a birthplace half remembered, a grandfather who swore he played beside a great one. This section builds Fort Wayne's list the way the rest of the record is built, name by name and source by source. Three kinds of claim are allowed, and each article states which one it rests on. Some of these players were born in Fort Wayne and schooled in its gyms: Rod Woodson at Snider, DaMarcus Beasley at South Side, Lloy Ball at Woodlan and IPFW, Trai Essex at Harding, Bernard Pollard at South Side, Eric Wedge at Northrop, Matt Vogel in the city's own pools. Some were born elsewhere and made Fort Wayne's by raising: Sharon Wichman, a Detroit birth and a Snider graduation, and June Peppas, a Kansas City birth and a Fort Wayne girlhood. And some belong to the city because the city's teams made them and they made the teams: Bobby McDermott and George Yardley of the Pistons, Dottie Collins and June Peppas of the Daisies, Len Thornson and Colin Chin of the Komets, and, for one summer that still stands in the TinCaps record book, Fernando Tatis Jr. Read together they measure something no single team history can: across ninety years, in nearly every American sport that keeps a hall of fame, somebody from Fort Wayne, or somebody Fort Wayne can honestly claim, was standing near the top of it.