The Ultimate Hoops Hall of Fame is something we’re very proud of, but since it was introduced at the start of 2018, the process has been mostly behind the curtain. There is a Hall of Fame page to view on our website, but there has been a lack of announcements to the public about how Hall of Famers are selected.

We’re making some changes to the Hall of Fame before we induct the Class of 2020, so now is the perfect time to pull back the curtain and show the details for the voting process.

There were 21 Hall of Fame voters in 2019, and all of them were involved in voting for nominees and voting for inductees. Each voter selected three players or contributors to nominate, which resulted in 10 people being nominated for the Class of 2019. The voters then had up to five votes to use on the nominees they felt were the most deserving to be inducted.

The voting for choosing inductees will stay the same, but the nomination process will change significantly. Instead of having all voters submit three picks for nomination, there will be a committee of six voters (Alan Arlt, Donald Dangmuk, Izzy Elkaffas, Anthony Leo, Reid Nelson and myself) who will come up with the nominees for the Class of 2020. After that, every voter will vote for inductees based on that list of nominees.

We are making this change based on the disconnect between the voters in the nomination process over the past two years. We’ve seen a mix of votes for a few obvious candidates and a few undeserving candidates, limiting the amount of deserving nominees to be up for induction. There has also been an issue of voters strictly nominating candidates from only their region, or picking players strictly based on the career stats page.

This is understandable, as stats are pretty much the only thing to go off of when you can’t watch a player in person. And you’re much more likely to select someone you see play every week. There is no perfect system for nominating candidates, but we feel having an extremely qualified committee, with the ability to meet in the same room, selecting the nominees is the best way to do it. The committee is made up of voters with decades of combined UH experience, dozens of combined national tournaments attended and three different regions represented.

The two other changes we’re making to the Hall of Fame this year is the requirements to be nominated and the timing of the induction.

We are increasing the number of career games played to be eligible for the Hall of Fame from 200 to 300. We started with 200 to make sure we had enough candidates eligible for the start of the Hall of Fame, and we now feel the requirements should be raised a bit to ensure the people getting in have shown dedication to Ultimate Hoops for a significant amount of time.

We will also be pushing up the timeline of the Hall of Fame announcements. The list of nominees will be announced on Monday, February 24. We will be announcing all of the nominees on this day, instead of releasing one at a time over the course of a few weeks, which we’ve done in the past. That will lead up until the Las Vegas National Tournament, where we will announce the Class of 2020 during the pre-tournament party held at the Green Valley pool deck on Friday, May 15.

We believe these changes will make the Hall of Fame better, and we’re looking forward to honoring the deserving inductees who will join this exclusive club this coming May.