Since 2009, every time the Marshall Thundering Herd softball team takes the field, they do so at Dot Hicks Field in Huntington. The Herd have been a successful program, at or near the top of their conference perennially for more than a decade.
But just who is Dot Hicks, the woman after whom the Herd’s home field is monikered?
Dr. Dorothy Hicks is a former administrator, coach, and professor at Marshall. Referred to as “the pioneer of the women’s sports program at Marshall” upon her induction into the program’s hall of Fame in 1990, Hicks impact was on Thundering Herd’s women’s sports as a whole, not just softball.
In fact, softball was one of the few sports that Hicks never coached at Marshall. She spent three decades as a professor at the university; served as the athletic director for women’s sports; and was the liaison to the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the group that hosted the inaugural Women’s College World Series’ and served as something of a predecessor to the NCAA becoming co-educational.
Hicks coached, at various times, the volleyball, badminton, tennis, and golf teams at Marshall. She also presided over the 1974 awarding of the first athletic scholarships to female athletes in Herd history.
In 2016, the university announced that their endowed scholarship program would be named after Hicks. Said a release at the time, “She is responsible for five different endowment scholarships at Marshall and has earned the right to have the Big Green Scholarship Endowment Program named in her honor.”
Alongside the re-naming of that program to the Dr. Dorothy Hicks Endowed Scholarship Program, Hicks also earned the name recognition on the Marshall softball field for her efforts promoting women’s athletics at Marshall and in the state of West Virginia.
