Hal McCoy is a former beat writer for the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio), covering the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. He was honored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002 as the winner of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, which is awarded annually "for meritorious contributions to baseball writing." He has won 52 Ohio and national writing awards and was the first non-Cincinnati newsperson elected to the Cincinnati Journalists Hall of Fame. He also was inducted into the National Sports Media Association Hall of Fame and the Irish-American Baseball Hall of Fame. He has a stone on Dayton's Walk of Fame and the press box at Dayton's Howell Field is named the Hal McCoy Press Box. McCoy has been the Cincinnati BBWAA Chapter Chair 22 times and was the BBWAA national president in 1997. He is the third writer from the Dayton Daily News to win the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, joining Si Burick (1982) and Ritter Collett (1991). Residing in Englewood, Ohio, McCoy is an honors graduate in journalism from Kent State University.
With three seconds left in overtime and 3.8 seconds left in a tie game, University of Dayton point guard Malachi Smith launched a half-court pass to 7-foot-1 Amael 'Frenchy' L'Etang and with 0:00.2 on the clock he dropped it into the basket to give the Flyers an 83-81 win over Chicago Loyola, snapping the Flyers' three-game losing streak in Atlantic 10 play.
For the third straight game, the heavily-favored University of Dayton basketball team tripped over the half-court line and tripped over the foul line and lost another Atlantic-10 Conference game, dropping the Flyers to 1-3 in league play and the loss to George Mason ended UD's 26-game winning streak in UD Arena.
