Le Moyne College Athletics

Bill Stanley 62’ – Class of 1988

Little big man…

Teacher Bill Stanley knows full well the adage: “Those who don’t understand the past are condemned to repeat it.”

He knows it as a dean’s list student and a history scholar cited in Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities when he graduated from Le Moyne College in 1962.

And Bill has devoted a lifetime to passing an understanding of the past on to future generations.

His distinguished career at Le Moyne points to one utterance that Bill Stanley’s students will never hear from him.  “It can’t be done” are words not found in this man’s lexicon.

Bill starred in both baseball and basketball at Le Moyne.  His excellence on the diamond won a contract with the Baltimore Orioles and he played professionally for two years.

Still, his foremost contributions to Dolphin athletics came on the hardwood.  This gifted athlete could play any position.  But in a sport where players of his size were called “small,” he was most effective when mixing it up inside.

At six-foot-two, you don’t average 10 and a half rebounds per game – 200 per season – wondering whether it can be done.  You simply do it.  And Bill Stanley did it for the Dolphins, while pouring in an average of 16.7 points per game over his three-year varsity career.  During his tenure on the Heights, Le Moyne put together what many consider to be the college’s best three back-to-back seasons.

Bill helped establish a tradition that’s now a hallmark of Le Moyne basketball players short on physical stature.  He played with a desire and intensity that mitigated any deficiency in size.

With that same sort of dedication, for a quarter century, Bill Stanley has worked with young people – in the classroom and in athletic competition.  He’s been a basketball and baseball coach on the college level, a high school basketball coach, a basketball official and tennis coach.

Six-foot-two seems short only around the hoop on a basketball court.  And this man never lacked for stature there.  Likewise, in the esteem of his students and players, and those who stood by his side as teammates, Bill Stanley assumers an aspect larger-than-life.  He is a teacher, a motivator, a friend – who points to the potential we all have to be more than what we seem to be.

Proud that his basketball career at Le Moyne provides an inspiring history worth repeating, we are honored to induct Bill Stanly to the Le Moyne College Athletic Hall of Fame.

April 30, 1988