Athletics Hall of Fame
The 1983-84 men's basketball team earned UW-Whitewater's first national championship trophy. Highly regarded after a trip to the NCAA Division III Final Four the previous year, Dave Vander Meulen's squad lived up to the expectations. Behind senior guard Andre McKoy, still UW-Whitewater's career scoring leader and the only player in program history to reach 2,000 points, UW-W shared the Wisconsin State University Conference title. McKoy was named the WSUC Player of the Year, and Vander Meulen was the league's Coach of the Year. Junior center Mark Linde, who went on to earn All-America honors the next season, and junior forward James Wilson, among UW-W's best defenders and a certainty as the school's all-time shot blocker if it had been an official statistic at the time, gave UW-W the complimentary inside game to defeat Clark University 103-86 in the championship game in Grand Rapids, Mich., giving UW-W a 27-4 record and the WSUC its first national basketball champion.
