It’s graduation weekend for Cowley College and Southwestern.
Cowley will be celebrating its 100th commencement beginning at 10 a.m. inside W.S. Scott Auditorium in Ark City.
Commencement for Southwestern College will be Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in Richard Jantz Stadium in Winfield.
A total of 484 Cowley College students will be candidates for graduation, according to a press release from Cowley, and 287 students are expected to participate in the commencement ceremonies.
The featured speakers will be Ed and Linda Hargrove.
Ed and Linda are members of the Tiger Athletic Hall of Fame. Linda is the second all-time winningest women’s basketball coach in Cowley history. She earned National Coach of the Year honors in 1987, was named Region VI Coach of the Year four times, and coached several All-Americans in basketball and volleyball.
She is the only Cowley coach to take basketball and volleyball teams to the national tournament.
“She was also an outstanding athlete at Cowley,” the college said. “She went on to serve as the general manager and head coach of the Portland Fire of the Women’s National Basketball Association and later worked as the general manager for the Washington Mystics and as an advisor for the WNBA’s Tulsa Shock.”
She was also the winningest coach in the history of the Wichita State University women’s basketball program until her record was broken in 2014, the college said.
Ed Hargrove won 1,142 games in 30 years as the head softball coach at Cowley.
Under his leadership, Cowley achieved 40 or more victories in 16 of his final 17 seasons and appeared in the national rankings in 16 consecutive seasons. He is the second-winningest coach in Cowley sports history, and his 1,142 victories ranked first in the nation on the National Junior College Athletic Association Division II wins list of active softball coaches at the time of his retirement. He was named the Jayhawk Conference Eastern Division Coach of the Year eight times.
Members of Cowley’s Student Senate will also address the class. Felipe Mentz, a business administration major from Porto, Brazil, served as Student Senate president during the 2022-2023 academic year. While Renissa Cinnamon, a sophomore liberal arts major from Perry, OK, served as secretary of the Student Senate.
Students listed in the official commencement program are candidates for the associate of arts degree, the associate degree of applied science, the associate degree of general studies, the associate degree of science, or the college certificate.
For Southwestern, commencement activities will be live streamed on closed circuit television on the Southwestern campus as well as online via the Southwestern College Facebook page and the Southwestern College YouTube channel.
Parking for graduation day will be available for persons with handicap permits in the parking lot between Christy Administration Building and Roy L. Smith Student Center. Security personnel will assist in finding parking and by providing rides on golf carts.
In case of inclement weather, the decision to move the commencement exercises indoors will be posted on www.sckans.edu/campus and on social media sites.
For more information call (620) 229-6223 or go to www.sckans.edu/commencement.
