The 2018 Georgia Tech Sports Hall of Fame class includes All-Americans Steven Blackwood (baseball), two-time NBA champion and Olympic medalist Chris Bosh (basketball), veteran NFL defensive lineman Michael Johnson, Adriane Lapsley Butler (track and field), Kristi Miller-North (tennis) and Chan Song (golf), as well as longtime athletics fundraiser Jack Thompson.
Tickets are on sale for the annual Induction Dinner on Sept. 21 (reception at 6 p.m., dinner and program at 7 p.m.) at $125 each through Aug. 15, $150 after Aug. 15. They can be purchased online (click here), and questions about the dinner and tickets can be directed to Barb Dockweiler (bdockweiler@athletics.gatech.edu) in the Alexander-Tharpe Fund.
By Matt Winkeljohn | The Good Word
Steven Blackwood last played baseball more than 12 years ago, and while he started his first job just a week ago, it’s quite likely that he’s been busier than every one of his former teammates since.
Just weeks before he is to be inducted in the Georgia Tech Athletic Hall of Fame, Dr. Blackwood began working as a foot and ankle specialist with Oxford Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine in Oxford, Miss., where his office works with the public and Ole Miss athletic programs.
He’s known for a long time that he wanted to be a doctor, and that was made clear when he returned to school after his junior season of 2005 even though the St. Louis Cardinals drafted him in the 26th round.
Blackwood had just earned first-team All-ACC honors after batting .336 with five home runs, 65 RBI and 61 runs scored.
The left-handed outfielder from Roswell was second-team All-ACC as a sophomore, batting .359 with four home runs, 66 RBI and 71 runs scored.
In 242 games with the Yellow Jackets from 2003-06, which remains tied for fourth-most played in program history, he put up big numbers with a career batting average of .326, 21 home runs, 221 RBI (fifth), 220 runs (fourth), 60 doubles (fifth) and a .423 on-base percentage.
As much as he loved the game – he still considers his former teammates to be “my fraternity” – school was more important, and that showed, too. On his way to graduating in 2007 with honors in biology, he earned multiple ACC academic honors and was an Academic All-America.
In 2006-07, after his athletic eligibility had expired, he worked in the athletic communications department and shadowed orthopaedic surgeons at Grady Hospital before four years of medical school at the former Medical College of Georgia. Also, in ’06 he was named Mr. Georgia Tech as part of homecoming.
In 2010, Blackwood and Sara Ballard, a former Tech diver he met as an undergraduate, were married. Together, they have two young children, William and Elizabeth, who were born while he did a five-year residency at Milwaukee’s Froedert Memorial Hospital in conjunction with the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Finally, following a one-year fellowship with the Orthopaedic Associates of Michigan in Grand Rapids that finished earlier this summer, he and his family moved to Oxford, where he began working Sept. 4.
He already seems to enjoy what he’s doing, yet Blackwood also loves to look back on his baseball career, during which he played on two ACC regular-season championship teams (2004, 2005), an ACC Tournament championship squad and played in the College World Series with the Yellow Jackets in 2006.