By LARRY VAUGHT

Vaught’s Views

During my years covering sports for The Advocate-Messenger I got to watch a lot of special athletes perform.

Many earned Division I scholarships. Some got the chance to play professional sports.

However, I’m not sure I ever really covered a more gifted athlete than Harrodsburg sprinter Ronda Boyd. She had speed and explosiveness that was just special, especially in the mid-1970’s when she was a dominant performer.

Boyd and Chrys Jones, a former Harrodsburg/Mercer County track standout, will be two of 10 athletes along with four coaches inducted into the Kentucky Track & Cross Country Coaches Hall of Fame during a ceremony Jan. 5 at the KHSAA Hall of Fame Room in Lexington. Cost to attend the awards banquet is $20 per person and reservations can be made by contacting Kathy Johnston at 859-494-2509 or at lexingtonkathy@aol.com.

Boyd is married to Henry Parks, a former all-state football player at Harrodsburg who played at Kentucky. Boyd-Parks is now a traveling certified surgical technician in the American Nursing Core in Cincinnati.

She admitted she was surprised to be selected for induction.

“It’s been so long since I was in high school and there are so many terrific athletes out there. I just never thought about anything like this happening. I am really honored, but I am also really surprised,” she said.

She shouldn’t be. Former Harrodsburg athletics director/track coach Alvis Johnson told me immediately just how special she would be and predicted she would be as good as any runner in the state immediately.

She was, too.

Boyd-Parks won 10 individual state championships during her track career at Harrodsburg, more than any other local girl has ever won. She also accumulated five other state medals to finish with 15 state medals.

She ran track at Western Kentucky University but after one year transferred to the University of Kentucky. In 1982 she was ranked as the nation’s 12th best performer in the 100-meter dash, her speciality in high school along with the long jump.

Boyd-Parks, who coached girls track and field three years at Harrodsburg, still ranks among the top 10 all-time sprinters in Kentucky.

Chrys Jones had the rare distinction of holding track records in two classes. He set the Class AA triple jump mark as a senior for Mercer County in 2007. A year earlier he set the Class A  mark while competing for Harrodsburg before the two school systems merged.

Jones was a five-time state high school champion and was just as dominant at Centre College where he was a four-time Division III triple jump national champion and six-time Division III All-American.

Like Boyd-Parks, he was as likable and humble off the track as he was dominant on the track. Both athletes competed in multiple events to help their teams in high school and college and perhaps it’s only fitting that the two small-town athletes from Harrodsburg now get to share a Hall of Fame induction together even if their prep careers were about 20 years apart.