* Veterans Committee Hall of Fame inductee.
Six-Member Hall of Fame Highlights CoSIDA's 2020 Special Award Honorees
Joe Mitch – Missouri Valley Conference/USBWA (retired)
A basketball legend.
Joe Mitch served 50 years in college athletics, including 27 years with the Missouri Valley Conference, before retiring in 2012. Mitch was sports information director at three institutions - Illinois-Chicago Circle (1968-70), Dayton (1973-75) and St. Louis (1975-76). He had served as an assistant SID at Southern Illinois for three years before joining the Metro Conference in 1976. He was Associate Commissioner of the MVC upon his retirement.
Mitch also had a great impact on the game of college basketball as he served 36 years as Executive Director of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association from 1983 to 2019, helping grow that association from a group of 200-plus members to more than 900 journalists and sportswriters covering college basketball. He also was editor of the association's Tipoff newsletter for several years.
At the Valley, Mitch served as tournament director for the MVC men's basketball tournament that annually ranked in the top 10 nationally in attendance among Division I conferences. Overall, he was involved in various capacities in 44 straight NCAA Final Fours. Mitch also worked the 1983 Davis Cup tennis quarterfinals, the 1977 Intercontinental Cup basketball series and served as a media relations officer at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and the 1994 U. S. Olympic Festival in St. Louis.
Among his other honors, Mitch was honored with a CoSIDA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. He earned the 2019 Cliff Wells Appreciation Award from the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) and will be inducted into the USBWA Hall of Fame - which he helped found - during the 2020 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Final Four in Atlanta.
The CoSIDA Hall of Fame Class of 2020 was honored virtually during the 2021 Virtual Convention.
Watch the original awards show here.
Updated June, 2021