MUNFORDVILLE, Ky. — Thirty-four years after he walked off the floor at Hart County High School as the best high school basketball player in the Commonwealth, Noel “Tick” Rogers is going into the Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame.
Rogers — the 1992 Kentucky Mr. Basketball, the all-time leading scorer in Hart County Raiders history, and the first boys’ player from the old 5th Region ever to claim the state’s top individual honor — is one of 12 players and coaches selected for the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026. The induction celebration is set for Saturday, Aug. 22, 2026, at 7 p.m. at the Lexington Opera House on Broadway in Lexington.
For a county of roughly 19,000 people sitting on the Green River between Elizabethtown and Bowling Green, it is the kind of honor that gets talked about at the Munfordville square, in the stands at Raider games, and across every kitchen table in south-central Kentucky that still remembers the winter of 1992.
Basketball royalty: inside the Hall of Fame Class of 2026
The Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Elizabethtown, called this year’s group extraordinary — a 12-person class it says represents “basketball royalty” from top to bottom, with strong family ties, scoring acuity, championship bloodlines and impressive post-high school careers. The class pushes the Hall’s total membership to 203 individuals, meaning the organization’s 200th all-time inductee will come from this group.
Rogers enters alongside some of the most decorated names in Kentucky prep history: 1959 Mr. Basketball and North Marshall state champion Pat Doyle; 1985 Mr. Basketball Tony Kimbro of Seneca; Marion County’s Anthony Epps, who won a state title in 1993 and an NCAA championship at Kentucky in 1996; his daughter Makayla Epps, the 2013 Miss Basketball; Owensboro Catholic’s Rebecca Greenwell Wathen; Knott County’s Herbie Stamper; Maytown’s Bob Tallent; and Logan County’s Fred Tisdale. The coaching contingent includes the father-and-son duo of Allen Feldhaus Sr. and Allen Feldhaus Jr., plus Rockcastle County’s Chrysti Noble.
The Hart County records that still haven’t been touched
Rogers’ name is not just in the Hart County record book. It is most of the record book.
He remains the school’s all-time leading scorer with 2,648 career points, and he also still holds the Raiders’ career records in assists, steals, rebounds and games played — a four-category sweep that tells you exactly what kind of player he was. He wasn’t a specialist. He was the whole roster in one uniform.
His path started in 1988, when he came in as a freshman playing on both the freshman and junior varsity teams. Halfway through that first season, Hart County moved him up to varsity, and he never came back down. By his senior year he was averaging better than 33 points a game and had been named first-team All-State in back-to-back seasons, in 1991 and 1992.
He led the Raiders to 24 wins as a senior. Then came the phone call that changed how the rest of the state looked at Hart County.
1992: Mr. Basketball comes to the 5th Region
Rogers was named Kentucky’s Mr. Basketball in 1992, becoming the first boys’ player in the history of the 5th Region to win the award. The runner-up in the voting that year was Ballard’s DeJuan Wheat — who would go on to become one of the great scorers in University of Louisville history.
Rogers has said the 1992 class may have been the deepest the state has ever produced, with roughly 14 Kentucky players signing Division I scholarships that spring. Winning the award out of a school the size of Hart County, in a region that had never produced a winner, is the part that has aged best.
He has also said his family made a point of not making a big deal of it — they cared more about him being humble and being a good person than about the trophy. He was, in his own telling, just a kid from Munfordville who had been playing on a goal his dad put up behind his grandmother’s house since he was three or four years old.
Before high school, he sharpened his game at the Fair Grounds in Munfordville, playing pickup against men 12 to 15 years older than he was. He has credited those beatings with teaching him what it was going to take.
Munfordville to Freedom Hall: Rogers at the University of Louisville
Rogers signed with Louisville and Hall of Fame coach Denny Crum, choosing the Cardinals over serious interest from South Carolina, Western Kentucky (where a young assistant named Tom Crean was recruiting him) and Minnesota, then coached by fellow south-central Kentucky product Clem Haskins.
The choice raised eyebrows at home. Rogers has estimated Munfordville is about 80 percent Kentucky fans — but his own family were Cardinals through and through, and he says the town backed him anyway, then and now.
He didn’t play much as a freshman and thought about transferring. He asked Crum what it would take to get on the floor. Crum’s answer, as Rogers tells it: you aren’t doing me any good if you score 10 points and your man scores 15.
From that point on, Rogers became one of the most disruptive defenders in Louisville history. Over 123 games from 1992 to 1996 he scored 842 points and averaged 6.8 per game — modest numbers that badly undersell him. What he actually did:
- Ranks fifth all-time at Louisville with 220 career steals
- Holds the school single-game record with 10 steals against Western Carolina in 1994 — a mark that still stands
- Recorded 86 steals as a junior, tying Darrell Griffith for one of the best single-season totals in program history
- Named Conference USA Defensive Player of the Year for the 1995-96 season
- Played in four NCAA Tournaments and 10 NCAA Tournament games
Ask Louisville fans of that era about Tick Rogers and you don’t get a stat line back. You get a story about somebody’s point guard having the worst night of his life.
Thirteen years, five countries: the professional career
Rogers went undrafted, but he wasn’t finished. He attended training camp with the Chicago Bulls and then built a long professional career overseas.
The Hall of Fame credits him with 13 years of professional basketball in Europe. Rogers himself has described it as 12 seasons in Europe plus one season stateside in the CBA with the Connecticut Pride, with overseas stops in Croatia, Turkey, Finland and Israel. Either way you count it, a kid from a town of about 1,600 people spent more than a decade getting paid to play the game on another continent.
A Hart County basketball family
The Rogers basketball line didn’t stop with Tick.
His daughter, Kyvin Goodin-Rogers, became a standout at Marion County High School, where she was a first-team All-State selection and a 2013 Miss Basketball finalist. She helped lead the Lady Knights to a perfect 39-0 record and the 2013 state championship — the first girls’ state title in Marion County history, and the first undefeated state champion in Kentucky since Marshall County in 1984. She signed with Kentucky, later played at Western Kentucky, and finished at Union University.
There’s a wrinkle here worth noting for anyone reading the Class of 2026 roster closely: Goodin-Rogers’ teammate on that undefeated Marion County team was Makayla Epps, who goes into the Hall of Fame this August in the same class as Kyvin’s father — as does Makayla’s father, Anthony Epps.
The family tree runs back through Hart County, too. Rogers is a cousin of the Faulkner family at Caverna; Cornelius Faulkner started on Hart County’s 1989 Sweet Sixteen team, and his twins Mason and Madison Faulkner each went on to score more than 3,000 points at Caverna.
The marker on the elementary school lawn
Munfordville got there ahead of Lexington on this one.
In July 2015, the Munfordville Tourism Commission dedicated a historical marker to Rogers on the lawn of Munfordville Elementary School — the school he attended for eight years before his four at Hart County High. Tourism chairman Ricky Line, who also happened to be Rogers’ high school coach, put it plainly at the time: Tick was the best player in the state of Kentucky in 1992, and he was well deserving of the honor.
Rogers has credited Line and coach Don Daniel as the first people who ever got on him about playing defense — the thing that ultimately carried him through four years at Louisville and 13 more as a professional.
How to attend the 2026 induction ceremony
The Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame’s 2026 Induction Celebration is scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 22, 2026, at 7 p.m. at the Lexington Opera House, 401 W. Short St., Lexington. Tickets are available through the Hall of Fame at khsbhf.com.
For Hart County, it’s one more night to point at the banner. The Raiders have had good players before and since. They’ve had exactly one Mr. Basketball — and now they have a Hall of Famer.
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Sources: Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame (khsbhf.com), Kentucky High School Athletic Association, University of Louisville athletics records, UK Athletics, Card Chronicle, Hart County News-Herald, and the Munfordville Tourism Commission historical marker.