The Indiana High School Athletic Association Foundation will take the lead from a long-time partner, when the Foundation hosts the Inaugural Impact Awards banquet on May 7 at the Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center’s Gridiron Hall.
The banquet will feature the awarding of roughly $40,000 in education scholarships for Indiana student-athletes. Also, the eight senior-class members of the IHSAA’s Student Advisory Committee will be honored, along with the awarding of the Foundation’s President’s Award.
Notre Dame men’s basketball head coach, Micah Shrewsberry, will be the keynote speaker.
The Impact Awards banquet will fill a void created when Forté Sports Medicine decided in late 2023 to discontinue its sponsorship of the Dr. Thomas A. Brady Comeback Awards event.
For nearly two decades, Forté annually sponsored the Brady Awards event that celebrated high school and college athletes who had overcome great adversity, and presented them with higher education scholarships.
The IHSAA had been part of the Forté-sponsored event, where the Association presented its C. Eugene Cato Memorial Scholarships – the organization’s longest-standing scholarship for student-athletes from around Indiana who exemplified the mission of education-based athletics.
Impact Awards Official Program
Forté’s decision to cease its sponsorship of the Brady Awards event left the IHSAA in a bit of a conundrum: How can its foundation recognize and honor student-athletes for their achievements – not simply on the athletic fields, but in the realm of education-based athletics?
“We felt we needed to continue this,” said Chris Kaufman, IHSAA Assistant Commissioner and President of the IHSAA Foundation. “We have never had a recognition event, never had an appropriate place to present these awards and celebrate our scholarship winners.”
So, the IHSAA Foundation is stepping in. Kaufman, with Foundation Director, Trip Lukemeyer, spearheaded the planning of Impact Awards banquet.
“We’ve made a lot of decisions in a short time,” Kaufman said. “Because of that, we’re walking, a bit, into year one. We believe this will continue to grow, so we want to get through year one, see what we like and see what things we’d like to change.”
Scholarship awards to be presented at the Impact Awards banquet include: the Cato scholarships; the David Cranfill True-Hearted Teammate Award; the Amy Hasbrook Family Leadership Award; the Lee Lonzo Champions-Together and Parker Amet Post-Secondary Scholarships; and the Sparks Foundation Post-Secondary Scholarship.
Also, Forté will continue to present the Brady Comeback Award.
“What is great about these scholarships is that it takes the resources and skills learned in education-based athletics and how those translate to rest of their lives,” Lukemeyer said.
“This gives us the ability to highlight these amazing student-athletes,” he continued. “Chris and I took over as leaders of the Foundation in May of 2023, so we are still very much in our infancy of leading the Foundation. This is still a young foundation (it was established in 2016) and we’re still learning how we can help student-athletes and member schools. We’re here to preserve education-based athletics for the next generation.”
For more information, or to purchase tickets for the Impact Awards banquet, visit ihsaa.org/foundation/impactawards.