Olympians and a late mayor among N.J. college’s sports hall of famers

Melanie Walker won the women’s 2005 NCAA Division 1 national championship in the 400-meter hurdle with the University of Texas, and later reached the pinnacle of track and field as her event’s 2008 Olympic Gold Medalist in Beijing, competing for her native Jamaica.

But before then Walker spent two years at Essex County College in Newark, where she was just as committed during those formative two years competing at the junior college level.

“At every level, you would have to say, you’re giving it 100%,” Walker told NJ Advance Media. “Every level plays its own role.”

Walker was one of seven inaugural inductees this month into the newly formed Essex County College Athletics Hall of Fame, honoring players, coaches and administrators from the Wolverines sports programs.

The inductees, announced in a May 9 ceremony on the University Avenue campus, included two of Walker’s Jamaican Oly mpic teammates: Novlene Williams-Mills, who attended ECC in 2001-2002; and Kerron Stewart, Walker’s teammate at both ECC in 2003 and 2004, and before then at St. Jago, where Stewart was also born in Kingston.

Williams-Mills went on from ECC to the University of Florida, where she sprinted for the Gators in a lengthy career that included three Olympic silver medals and a world championship gold for Jamaica’s national team, all in the 4 X 400-meter relay.

Stewart went on from ECC to star at Auburn University, and later won a silver medal in the 100 meter dash in Beijing, where all three Essex alumnae won Olympic medals for Jamaica.

Essex County has a large Jamaican-American community, and Walker said ECC was well known on the Caribbean island as a firm starting block for sprinters and hurdlers looking to transfer to big-time schools, the Olympics, and professional ranks.

“It is one of the most highly rated colleges to go to to move on to the next level in your track and field career,” said Walker, 42, who lives and coaches track in Jamaica but has family in Essex County.

ECC competes with other junior colleges in the Garden State Athletic Conference (GSAC) and National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA).

The school’s reputation was largely built by one of the other inductees, Russell Rogers, a competitive hurdler who became ECC’s first track and field coach, recruiting and training talented athletes to produce a long list of all-Americans and team titles from 1971 through 1978.

But track and field is not ECC’s only athletic claim to fame. The Wolverines’ 1973–74 men’s basketball team was inducted collectively, after setting the national junior college scoring record for points in a season.

Inductees also included Cleo Hill Sr., a Newark scholastic basketball standout who went on to lead Winston-Salem Teachers College in North Carolina to consecutive Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) titles, before playing for the NBA’s old St. Louis Hawks franchise.

ECC President Augustine A. Boakye presided over the induction ceremony.

But it was a former mayor of ECC’s host city who was perhaps the best known of the inductees, former State Senator and Newark Mayor Sharpe James, whose death at 89 was announced on May 12, three days after his ECC induction.

James ran track and played tennis at what’s now known as Montclair State University, before becoming ECC’s founding athletic director. He served in the job from the college’s opening in 1968 to his departure in 1986, when he won the first of a record five 4-year terms as mayor.

James had a long and eventful political career, a passionate promoter of the city who presided over development projects that included a pair of major sports facilities: Bears and Eagles Riverfront Stadium, completed in 1999 and demolished in 2019; and the Prudential Center arena, completed in 2007.

But the arena opened only after James left office, declining to seek a sixth term amid allegations of corruption, before his conviction once he left office of rigging the sale of city property to a girlfriend at a steep discount.

But at the Essex college, James “will always be remembered as the ‘Father of ECC Athletics,’” his Hall of Fame biography states.

“He laid the foundations for all of the Essex County College athletics programs, including basketball, track/field, soccer, and tennis,” the biography adds.

Just as ECC was an essential rung on the ladder of Walker’s success as a hurdler, she said that being in the inaugural class of the Athletic Hall of Fame was an accolade she appreciated like any other.

“Great, awesome, fantastic,” she said of how it feels. “It’s always good to know that you have gone somewhere and you have done your best and someone recognizes you for it.”

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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com