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Former EIU Faculty Athletic Representative selected for honor

From EIU Athletics:

(BRENTWOOD, Tenn.) – Former Eastern Illinois Faculty Athletics Representative Dr. Gail Richard and former Murray State women's golf coach and Senior Woman Administrator Velvet Milkman have been elected to the Ohio Valley Conference Hall of Fame. The duo will be officially inducted at the annual OVC Honors Dinner which will be held on Thursday, May 29 in Franklin, Tennessee.
 
The Ohio Valley Conference Hall of Fame was organized in 1977 with the intent of honoring the coaches, administrators, faculty and staff who have been associated with the OVC for at least five years and provided extensive and outstanding service to the Conference. With the induction of this year's class, the membership will reach 100.
 
Richard served as the Panthers Faculty Athletic Representative (FAR) from 1994 through 2011, helping to represent the athletic department on a campus, regional and national level. For her efforts in that role she was one of the inaugural winners of the OVC's Thurston Banks Award for Distinguished Academic Service in 2013.
 
As a FAR, Richard helped EIU go through the NCAA certification process and also make the move from the Mid-Continent Conference to the OVC. She served on the NCAA Division I Management Council (2004-08), the EIU academic integrity subcommittee for NCAA certification, the EIU presidential task force on athletics and was actively involved with the EIU Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC).
 
As a faculty member she served as Department Chair for Communications Disorders and Sciences, earned a Distinguished Faculty Award and served a term as Chair of the EIU Faculty Senate. In addition she has assisted the EIU sports information department for parts of four decades as a game basketball statistician and football radio broadcast crew member.
 
Since retiring from EIU as a faculty member in 2014, Richard served as the Director of the Autism Center at Eastern Illinois University and currently resides in Charleston. EIU now has an annual award for a student-athlete named the "Dr. Gail Richard Sportsmanship Award." It is presented to an athlete that has portrayed the qualities of sportsmanship not in their sport but also in the community and been a successful student in the classroom.
 
Milkman is synonymous with the sport of women's golf in the OVC. She began the Murray State program in 1993 (the year of the first OVC Women's Golf Championship) and was the only coach the program knew during its tenure in the OVC prior to her retirement at the end of the 2021-22 season.  She is the first full-time women's golf coach to be enshrined into the OVC Hall of Fame.
 
She led Murray State to 12 OVC Women's Golf Championships, which his doubled the amount of the second-place team in league history. On three different occasions her teams won three consecutive championships (1997-99, 2002-04 and 2017-19). In addition her teams finished as runners-up five times and placed outside of the top three only five times in 28 OVC championship appearances.  MSU also made six NCAA Regional appearances during her tenure.
 
Milkman coached eight players who earned 10 total OVC Player of the Year awards, eight players who won OVC medalist honors and 55 players who were named All-OVC. Her teams also excelled in the classroom, with 35 players earning the OVC Academic Medal of Honor and her program earning four OVC Team Academic Achievement Awards. In addition, every four-year player that she coached graduated and won at least one OVC Championship.
 
She also helped grow the game of women's game, serving a four-year term on the NCAA Women's Golf Committee, including two years as Chair. Milkman also impacted the OVC by serving as Murray State's Senior Woman Administrator (SWA), as well as leading the department as Interim Athletics Director from July 2018 through February 2019.