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.

When Assistant AD Cody Bush assigned me the (frankly, supremely easy) task of writing about Alex Robles' Austin Peay career and his merits for inclusion in the Athletics Hall of Fame, he joked that we could title it, "The Legend of Alex Robles."

For some reason, this struck a familiar chord with me. Plenty of ink had been spilled in service of chronicling Robles' Austin Peay career, much of it laying out his successes in the form of "Man, can y'all believe how good this guy is?" For whatever reason, that phrase stuck out.

And lo and behold – it's because we'd already used The Legend of Alex Robles as a title, way back during his senior season. Reading the whole thing back was a neat summation of what he brought to the field, how impactful he was and how his feats did not seem possible. A Loch Ness Monster, but for baseball exploits; rumored, but must be seen to be believed?

It's easier to call him what he was – one of the best to ever do it for the Govs.

"Alex was the definition of a stud," said Jordan Harmon, a pitcher and Robles' teammate for four seasons in Clarksville. "Each and every day watching how good he was and how he competed was awesome to watch. He never ceased to amaze me on the mound, in the box, and in the field. He balled out in every aspect of the game."

A sampling, as follows, of the Robles oeuvre:

• Threw a shutout one day and delivered the walk-off home run the next against Jacksonville State.
• Became the first player in Ohio Valley Conference history to earn two first-team All-OVC honors – one for pitching, one as a utility player – in the same season.
• Became the only player in OVC history to be named All-OVC five times in a four-year career; not only a mathematical impracticality but a realistic improbability for all but Alex Robles.
• Capped his career with a walk-off grand slam in his final at-bat at Raymond C. Hand Park.

If you entered all that into a sports movie script, producers might return it annotated as "heavy-handed and a bit too far-fetched for the average viewer to believe." For Alex Robles' Austin Peay career, it's just the historical record. And this show went on three times every weekend at the plate and, often, Friday nights on the mound for four years.

Robles' versatility had versatility, layers on layers of what he could provide the ball club. Every February, he'd start in the bullpen as the Govs endeavored to keep him fresher, longer for the grind ahead. And every year, without fail, he'd slowly work his way back into the starting rotation until he was often the guy taking the ball on Friday nights against the best starter from the opposing team.

"When he was on the mound, you felt like you had a chance to win," said Cayce Bredlau, a starter for the Govs in the outfield during Robles' Austin Peay career. "When he was at the plate, you always felt like he'd get something done, and it always made you as a player want to have his back."

The same went for his ability to play everywhere in the field. He was a good second baseman. And a good third baseman. And he could play shortstop in a pinch. He could play a corner outfield spot, and was perfectly fine over at first base too. I never saw him grab the mask and settle in for an inning behind the plate, but that doesn't mean he couldn't and doesn't mean he didn't.

If pressed, I've no doubt he couldn't hit the fungos with the finest coaches in the game or sat in for the radio broadcast and provided top-level analysis too. It's just that no one ever asked him to.

(Yet?)

"You could put him anywhere and there'd be no drop off if somebody was sick or hurt that day," Bredlau said. "He could do anything for the team. He was so competitive. I would compare him to Kobe [Bryant] in terms of his process, how much the game meant to him. The game was everything to him. He loved it, it ate him up, it was all he could talk about."

That last point is what separated Robles from his peers. People get into college baseball for all kinds of reasons – educational opportunities, love of the game, prepping for a pro career, a wedge into the world they can hopefully parlay into coaching opportunities down the road or some combination of the four – but Robles had the love for the sport as much or more than anyone who ever donned an Austin Peay uniform. It was about the game, always; the game that had been so good to him. In his every performance, it seemed he was determined to find a way to repay the game for what it had given him.

"If there's anybody that deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, it's Robles," Bredlau said. "I don't think there's anybody more deserving in terms of being versatile and playing the game with the love and passion like he did."