ANTHONY BOGGS
Basketball, 1980-84
Inducted February 22, 1997

Anthony Boggs put together four solid seasons with the SMS basketball Bears in a career, which, more than any other player, spanned the move of the SMS basketball program from NCAA Division II to Division I status and from membership in the Missouri Intercollegiate Athletic Association into the Mid-Continent Conference.  Boggs, a native of Independence, Kansas, lettered all four years for SMS from 1980 through 1984, playing three seasons for coach Bob Cleeland and as a senior for coach Charlie Spoonhour.  The Bears were in a series of near-miss campaigns when Boggs was playing as they just missed an NCAA playoff berth in their final Division II season in 1981-82, dropped the last two games of the year to fall percentage points short of a Mid-Continent title in the league’s first season in 1982-83, and missed by one point a trip to the finals of the conference tournament at the end of the 1983-84 campaign.  Boggs set an SMS career record with 113 games played and started 71 of those contests over his four SMS seasons.  He also established a record for career steals with 161.  Boggs remains fifth on the all-time list for games played and is still sixth in career assists with 377.  He became the 16th SMS cager ever to score 1,000 career points, going beyond that mark late in his senior season to finish with a four-year total of 1,018.  An SMS co-captain as a senior in 1983-84, Boggs also established a new SMS record for consecutive free throws when he hit 36 in a row over a span of nine games his senior season.  He wound up ninth in SMS career free throw percentage with a .775 figure, and had the fifth best single season foul line accuracy mark with an .836 mark his senior season.  Boggs had 51 double-figure scoring games among his 113 SMS contests, and had half a dozen 20-point games.  He was named to the Mid-Continent all-conference second team list as a senior.  He earned spots on the MCC academic all-conference team each of his last three seasons and was an academic all-America honorable mention as a junior and senior.  He won the Guy Thompson Award as the outstanding graduating senior basketballer in 1984.  He was also the 1984 recipient of the Virgil Cheek Athletic Achievement Award, given annually to the outstanding SMS graduating senior athlete, as well as gaining nomination for an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship.