Cullowhee, N.C. – Four Catamounts are set to be enshrined into the Western Carolina Athletics Hall of Fame on Friday, Nov. 14, with the special evening ceremony to be held in the third-floor Grand Room of the on-campus Hinds University Center.
Former Catamount baseball player and coach Todd Raleigh (Player,1988-91; Coach, 1993-95 and 2000-07), women's track & field standout
Alisha Bradshaw (2012-15),
Ashley Hovda Kress (2002-06) from women's golf, and former athletic trainer
L. Ray "Slim" Davis (1980-84) will each be
enshrined on Hall of Fame weekend, Nov. 14-15, 2025.
Friday evening's festivities begin with a meet-and-greet social from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., followed by the special induction ceremony at 7 p.m. The event is open to the public and free of charge, though it is respectfully requested that attire meet decorum. Dress for the Friday night event is business to business casual.
All four honorees will then be recognized at Saturday's Catamount football game against ETSU, with kickoff at Noon at E.J. Whitmire Stadium / Bob Waters Field.
Purchase Tickets / Parking in Advance
Raleigh is the 25th Catamount baseball player – and the fourth former WCU skipper – to be inducted into the WCU Athletics Hall of Fame. Bradshaw is just the fourth from the Catamount women's track & field team to receive the honor, while Kress, who was previously inducted as part of the 2002-03 women's golf team and enshrined back in 2014, is only the second women's golf individual player to be inducted all-time.
Davis earns an honorary induction for professional achievement, the first for WCU since Gerald Austin was honored back in 2021.
Western Carolina football (6-4, 5-1 SoCon) remains very much alive for a chance to snap a 42-year drought of advancing to the NCAA FCS football postseason. The Catamounts continue to have an outside chance at sharing the school's first-ever SoCon football title, needing to win out against mountain-rival ETSU (5-5, 3-3 SoCon) in Saturday's final home game of the regular season and at VMI (1-9, 0-6 SoCon) on Nov. 22 to finish with a league record of 6-1. WCU also needs third-place Chattanooga (5-5, 4-2 SoCon) to score a victory over the conference's automatic qualifier, eighth-ranked Mercer (8-1, 7-0 SoCon), on Saturday in Macon, Ga.
Western Carolina and ETSU meet on Saturday (Nov. 15), as the two mountain rivals square off at Whitmire Stadium / Waters Field in the annual gridiron grudge match, the "Blue Ridge Border Battle," with the traveling trophy, "the Rock" again up for grabs. Kickoff of the annual Senior Day and Hall of Fame Day game is scheduled for Noon as the Ingles SoCon Game of the Week on Nexstar and ESPN+ (
paid subscription required). Saturday's game will also air on the Catamount Sports Network with an 11 a.m. airtime.
On the heels of last week's third-largest crowd in Whitmire Stadium history (14,510), single-game tickets and gameday parking for Saturday's rivalry game against ETSU are on sale now at CatamountSports.com/BuyTickets or by phone by calling (828) 227-2401.
Please note that several parking lots surrounding the stadium have already begun to sell out and ticket sales continue to be brisk ahead of WCU's final regular-season home date.
Keep track of everything related to Catamount football and WCU Athletics through its social media outlets on Facebook (FB.com/CatamountSports; FB.com/catamountsportsnetwork) and Twitter (@catamounts, @CatamountsFB).
