The person who oversaw one of the highest attended men’s volleyball NCAA Tournaments will be inducted into his school’s hall of fame.
IPFW announced Wednesday that Dan Gebhart, a former associate athletic director for operations and Mastodons men’s basketball player, was selected for the IPFW Athletics Hall of Fame.
Gebhart worked in the athletics department for 32 years and was the tournament director for the 1988, 1994 and 2000 men’s volleyball NCAA Tournaments that where played at IPFW. Almost 20 years since the 1994 Final Four, the tournament’s 15,495 overall attendance remains the second-highest attended Final Four in NCAA men’s volleyball history.
The 1994 NCAA Tournament is still one of the most controversial tournaments since the men’s volleyball national championship became a NCAA sanctioned event in 1970.
Then-No. 6 IPFW after losing in the MIVA Tournament earned the lone at-large bid to the four-team NCAA Tournament over then-No. 2 Stanford — becoming the first non-West Coast to receive the at-large bid. In addition, Penn State defeated UCLA in the championship match to be the first non-West Coast team to win a men’s volleyball NCAA title.
Prior to working in the athletics department, Gebhart attended IFPW as a student and played on the men’s basketball team. Gebhart was a two-year captain for the Mastodons and had 416 career points and 200 career rebounds before graduating in 1978.
“I’m honored, humbled, and a little awestruck by my selection to the IPFW Athletic Hall of Fame,” Gebhart said in a statement.
Gebhart is one of three members selected to the IPFW Athletics Hall of Fame. Among the other inductees includes former women’s volleyball player Heather Teagarden who helped lead Mastodons to back-to-back conference titles in the 1990s.
The class of 2011 will be formally enshrined into the hall of fame on Dec. 3 at the Steel Dynamics Keith E. Busse IPFW Alumni Center.