Longtime Lady Vols writer Dan Fleser inducted into U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame

CLEVELAND — Longtime Lady Vols basketball writer Dan Fleser was affectionately known as "Dan, Dan the writer man" by Pat Summitt's teams in the mid 1990s.

Former Lady Vols player Abby Conklin still calls Fleser by that nickname. When she congratulated him this week after he was named to the U.S. Basketball Writers Association's Hall of Fame, she said she hoped they would put "Dan, Dan the writer man" on his plaque.

On Friday, Fleser was inducted to the USBWA 2024 Hall of Fame class and was honored at the annual USBWA awards brunch in Cleveland prior to the Final Four. Women's basketball writer Michelle Smith also was inducted.

It has been more than 25 years since he covered Conklin's career at Tennessee, where she won two national championships under Summitt. But she was just one of the many strong relationships he developed on the Lady Vols beat for nearly three decades for Knox News.

"I think when you cover teams that win like that, you sort of get swept up in it with them," Fleser said. "You're along for the whole ride, and they tend to look at you as being part of it, even though you really aren't . . . it was just a really fun ride with a lot of good people and a lot of great stories."

Fleser was the predominant Lady Vols beat writer for decades, and he covered all but one of Summitt's eight national championships. He wrote about legendary players like Daedra Charles, Michelle Marciniak, Chamique Holdsclaw, Tamika Catchings, Semeka Randall and Candace Parker.

He covered Summitt's career with depth and care, and he was one of two journalists invited to her home when she announced she had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Fleser remembers the shock, and was grateful for the grace Summitt extended after the years he spent on the beat.

"I always felt like she had great respect for what I did and how I did it, even before all of that," he said. "So to me, it was just kind of an extension of that . . . I was very grateful that when she's going to make an announcement of that magnitude that she felt like, well, Dan's got to be on the ground floor of this."

Fleser worked at the News Sentinel from 1988 to 2019. The native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was elected to the Tennessee Sports Writers Association’s Hall of Fame in the Class of 2022 and was honored by the Greater Knoxville Sports Hall of Fame in 2021. Fleser won the WBCA Mel Greenberg Media Award in 2008. His reporting at Knox News included two trips to the College World Series and the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.

In his speech Friday, Fleser credited both the access Summitt gave him at Tennessee and the investment from the News Sentinel in women's basketball coverage. Both were critical to the quality of journalism he produced in his career.

"You have to have both — you have to have the access, and you have to have investment from the employer to do that," Fleser said. "Without the access, without the means to do this, I wouldn't be standing here today as 'Dan, Dan the Hall of Fame man.' "

Former Knox News reporter Emily Adams wins Rising Star Award

Emily Adams was named the 2024 USBWA Rising Star for women's basketball writing. Adams, who covers UConn women's basketball for the Hartford Courant, began her career at the News Sentinel as a high school sports writer in 2021.

Adams joined the Greenville News to cover South Carolina football and women's basketball in 2022, and moved to Hartford to cover UConn and the WNBA's Connecticut Sun in December 2023.

Adams won an APSE award this year for event coverage for her stories about South Carolina women's basketball's historic season-opening game in Paris vs. Notre Dame.

Cora Hall covers University of Tennessee women’s athletics. Email her at cora.hall@knoxnews.com and follow her on Twitter @corahalll. If you enjoy Cora’s coverage, consider a digital subscription that allows you to access all of it.