Austin Peay's 46th Athletics Hall of Fame Class will be inducted during ceremonies held Feb. 23-24, 2024, includes baseball's Tyler Rogers and Alex Robles, men's basketball's Chris Horton, volleyball's Ashley Slay, athletic trainer Joni Johnson, and football's Philip Farinella. The athletics department will recognize the class at halftime of the men's basketball game against Lipscomb on Saturday, Feb. 24. Tickets for that day's basketball doubleheader, which includes the women's basketball game against North Alabama, are available for purchase online through Ticketmaster.
Winning or losing, Ashley Slay was doing it with a smile.
Before the winning – or at least the consistent winning, the winning that earned rings and titles and long-lasting acclaim – it might have seemed like Slay (or Ashley Glotta, which she now does business as after marrying former Austin Peay men's basketball player Zach Glotta) wasn't taking it seriously, that the wins and losses were less relevant than whether or not she was having fun.
A modest proposal: if Ashley Slay wasn't having fun playing volleyball, all those wins and titles and rings might have never materialized in the first place.
She had to have fun. If flashing that thousand-watt smile was the thing that powered up her massive right arm, that's what the Govs needed. The 2019 Ohio Valley Conference Player of the Year didn't need to be a grimacing, unhappy hardo to be a successful volleyball player – in fact, quite the opposite.
"She was always high-energy," said head coach Taylor Mott. "She always had a big smile on her face. She was fun to coach, and she loved to play. She lifted her teammates when they were down. She could be encouraging but stern; she had a way of getting people to play at her emotional level."
She set the tone on and off the court. If your best player also doubled as the one who had the most fun, who showed up to practice every day with a mile-wide grin on her face and danced like Shakira on the bench every time the team scored a point, that has an impact on a squad. If she could be a cut up one second and a leader pushing her teammates to be better, do better, do more in pursuit of victory in the next – and do so without losing any of that signature charm – how could any teammate worth having not be drawn to such a magnetic presence?
(As an aside: Few student-athletes in Austin Peay history have attended other events as a spectator as visibly or as vocally as Ashley Slay. Ruthless is a good word. In the ill-fated Murray State basketball game that involved an hours-long stoppage after lightning poked a hole in the Dunn Center ceiling, Slay rolled back in to watch the final few minutes in her PJ's with a bag of McDonald's. Absolute high queen business.)
"She was our leader and our glue," said libero and defensive specialist Allie O'Reilly, who was Slay's teammate in 2017 and 2018. "She knew it was her responsibility to show up every day, because she was heartbeat of the team. She exudes light and positivity, and that makes you want to be better and work hard. Our chemistry on those teams was the best I ever had on any team I ever played on, and she was a huge factor."
The story of her career is one of overcoming. She played as a freshman – starting, occasionally excelling and showcasing potential as an imposing blocker in the middle en route to All-Freshman honors from the OVC. The story her sophomore season was similar – big defender, one of several options on the outside, but the Govs struggled through a 10-win season as Slay tried to establish herself as more of a presence.
Knowing that about her – watching that metamorphosis come as she fought, failed, got up, struggled on and eventually became a legend through the sheer force of her indomitable will and unfailing belief in herself – is about as rewarding as it gets in college sports. For the fan, for the administrator, for the coach, for the support staff, for teammates who invest in another person's well-being and success as an avatar for their own, the wins and rings are nice. Anyone can win, yes. A team filled with talent and no heart can, ostensibly, win and win big and win often. Despite what many self-help books would have you believe, talent is most often the trump card, the tie-breaker, when it comes to teams evenly (or maybe not-so-evenly) matched in a battle of wills.
But not everyone can or will persevere through two up-and-down years, take a look at herself in the mirror and decide, "Nah, we're not going through it like that again" and become the catalyst for one of the nation's largest year-to-year turnarounds as a junior and then win the whole dang thing as a senior.
During Slay's junior season, the Govs won 14 more matches than they did the previous year. This is not only because of Slay's influence – Kristen Stucker taking complete ownership of the setter role helped, as did the addition of attacking presences Cecily Gable, Christina White and Kaitlyn Teeter – but Slay, quite simply, ascended to a higher plane that year in leading Austin Peay to one of the nation's largest single-season turnarounds. She kick-started this ascent by becoming Austin Peay's first-ever AVCA National Player of the Week after a 37-kill weekend against Eastern Illinois and SIU Edwardsville on her way to 397 kills, her first All-OVC honor and Austin Peay's first 20-win season since 2010.
2017 might have been her swan song, but Slay went out with a bang, recording 475 kills – the fourth-highest total in program history – as she became OVC Player of the Year. Her counting stats were once again amazing – with 104 blocks, she became both Austin Peay's all-time leader in the category as well as the second player in program history with multiple 100-block seasons – but the sweetest part of her senior campaign was winning the OVC title and advancing to the NCAA Tournament.
Here again it's important to single out Slay's maturation and sense of the moment. In the 2017 OVC title match against Murray State – the moment, of all moments, that should have rightly belonged to the senior offensive leader – Slay simply didn't have it against a Racer squad bent on stopping her above all else. Freshman Ashley Slay would have fought God armed only with a rusty butter knife for the opportunity to seize that moment, consequences to herself and her team but a passing thought in pursuit of glory.
Senior Ashley Slay stepped aside, cheered her team on to every point, hugged freshman Brooke Moore when she was named Most Outstanding Player of the Tournament and laughed all the way to the Govs' NCAA Tournament appearance against UCLA.
One last thing: opponents hated her. Not only because she was awesome, but because her awesomeness and all that came with it – the bravado, the swagger, the trash-talk, the laughter – was always in your face. Don't like it? Better stop her.
"Opponents hated her," Mott said. "She ran her mouth and talked nonstop and they couldn't stand it."
"She's super-competitive," O'Reilly said, echoing their former head coach. "You did not want to be on the other side of the net from her, because she just trash-talks and is funny and so easy to hate because she's so good and so athletically talented."
Opponents may not have wanted to be across from Ashley Slay, but the Govs were thrilled to see her on the court every day for four years. That swagger? It matched her play, for which there's only really one word: legendary.
