The Limestone County Sports Hall of Fame board made the decision Monday it hoped it wouldn’t have to, canceling the 2020 induction ceremony due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hall of Fame president Jeff Hodges said the board had hoped to move the banquet, which was originally scheduled to take place June 6, to the fall.

They hoped, by then, the outbreak would have slowed enough to host the banquet.

However, uncertainty about the health and economic status of the county due to the virus caused the board to decide to cancel the banquet outright. The Martha Jo Memorial Scholarship Golf Tournament, which had originally been scheduled for June 4, was also canceled.

“Our fundraising efforts are based on the small business community,” Hodges said. “With the current state of the economy, we did not feel good about going out and soliciting the small business community here for funds for the golf tournament and banquet in the current environment we’re in.

“Secondly, even though things are opening back up and I’m personally optimistic about where things are heading, to go into planning what it would take for a banquet, we would need to know if people would even be willing to come out for that type of environment in the fall. There’s really no way to practice social distancing in that environment, and we did not want to take that risk on whether people would be comfortable coming back out.”

A 2020 induction class was not selected before a state of emergency was declared March 13 and businesses and schools began closing.

“We were supposed to vote in our class during our March meeting, and that was right when the pandemic hit,” Hodges said. “We had to cancel that meeting and had not met again until Monday.”

Hodges said a determination has not been made whether to induct more people into the 2021 class to make up for 2020’s cancellation.

“We did talk about a few potential things for next year’s class, but that will be determined when we get back together,” he said. “We said we’ll take this up in January, which is usually the meeting where we vote to determine the size of the class. Whether we do it as normal or expand it due to the fact we didn’t do it this year will be determined then.”

In addition to the banquet, the Limestone County Sports Hall of Fame provides thousands of dollars of scholarship money to local student-athletes. This year, the hall of fame was to give four students $4,000 each, which would have been the largest amount of money given.

Hodges said not being able to reward the scholarship money was the worst thing about canceling the event.

“We weren’t able to get our scholarship applications out to the schools before they released due to the virus,” Hodges said.