(Butler, PA) A three-sport star who helped Butler County Community College’s volleyball program to win its first two state championships and who has won consecutive governmental elections since, and an out-of-state transfer who helped BC3’s men’s basketball team to a national No. 7 ranking and who became an All-American will be inducted Saturday into BC3’s Charles W. Dunaway Pioneer Hall of Fame.
Kimberly (Burford) Geyer, of Mars, a Butler County commissioner; and Kevin Dill, of Campbell, Ohio, president of Creekside Mortgage Co., Boardman, Ohio, will be recognized as Class of 2022 members during an induction ceremony in BC3’s Field House.
Their plaques will bring to 18 those in the college’s 7-year-old hall of fame. The induction ceremony will be BC3’s first since 2019.
“It is humbling to be recognized in the company of so many other gifted athletes who have been honored in the past.”
Geyer and Dill will be recognized with Class of 2020 hall of fame selections Tracy Pease and Hal Koenemund, and with Class of 2021 selections Nicole (Sebastian) Bajuszik and Stefan Carlsson.
BC3 on Saturday will also recognize Breanna Reisinger, Morgan Jack and Aslyn Pry, first-year student-athletes selected as National Junior College Athletic Association Division III All-Americans since December.
“It’s an extreme honor to have my name with other names at the top. This is tremendous to me."
“Grateful to Chuck Dunaway”
Dunaway served as a BC3 coach and as the college’s first athletic director. He helped to found the Skyline Athletic Conference, which predates the Western Pennsylvania Collegiate Conference in which BC3’s athletics programs currently compete, and the former Pennsylvania Collegiate Athletic Association.
“I’ve always been grateful to Chuck Dunaway, who was the athletic director at the time I went to college at BC3,” Geyer said. “He was so instrumental in starting the women’s athletic programs that I was involved in at BC3.”
Geyer, a Mars Area High School graduate who has won Butler County commissioner elections in 2015 and in 2019, was a co-captain of the Pioneers’ softball, women’s basketball and volleyball teams from 1981 to 1983.
“It is humbling to be recognized in the company of so many other gifted athletes who have been honored in the past,” Geyer said. “This has allowed me to be reflective. We’re looking back many years, and times were certainly different, especially for women’s athletics.”
Dill was a member of Campbell (Ohio) Memorial High School boys basketball and baseball squads that won Ohio High School Athletic Association state championships in March and in June 1993. He attended Youngstown State University, then transferred to BC3, where he played for the college’s men’s basketball team in 1995-1996.
“It’s an extreme honor to have my name with other names at the top,” Dill said. “This is tremendous to me. I worked hard to get there, and it took a lot of other people’s help to get me there. … When I will look back, it will be one of the big moments in my life.”
“Living up to the Pioneer name”
Geyer was a hitter on BC3 volleyball squads that won two regular-season Skyline Athletic Conference championships, then two SAC postseason championships, and then Pennsylvania Collegiate Athletic Association championships in 1981 and in 1982.
“The first time we won the state championship, that was almost an unheard-of feat,” Geyer said. “We weren’t favored. And the fact that we were able to do it just meant the world to us. We were BC3. We went out east, excelled at every level and ended up winning the entire thing.”
Geyer was also selected to the SAC all-conference volleyball team in her first season.
She was a forward on Pioneers’ women’s basketball squads who averaged 17 points and finished her second season as the SAC’s top rebounder with an average of 11.
Geyer was a catcher on BC3 softball teams who hit six fence-clearing home runs in her first season. She also hit two home runs to help BC3 win a second-round SAC postseason game.
“Now that I am older, I did not realize what a pioneer we really were in women’s sports,” Geyer said. “We were really living up to the Pioneer name. There was no precedent. We were setting the precedent, and we didn’t even realize it.”
She earned an associate degree in liberal arts from BC3. In 2018 she received a BC3 Distinguished Alumni Award. She has served on the BC3 Education Foundation board, and since 2011 as a member of BC3’s board of trustees.
“I am going … to play at BC3”
Dill had completed his first year as a walk-on at Youngstown State University, then left. He was playing in a summer basketball league when met up with a friend. His friend played at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania and told then-BC3 men’s basketball coach Dick Hartung about Dill.
“Which was probably the biggest thing that ever happened in my life,” Dill said. “Coach Hartung came to a summer game and said, ‘Hey, look, you’re going to come play for me. He didn’t really even give me a choice. And when I walked off the court, I called my dad. I said, ‘Hey dad, you know what? I think I am going to go over and play at BC3 with Coach Hartung.’”
He led the WPCC with averages of 26 points, 7.7 assists and 4.2 steals per game in his only season with the Pioneers, and was named WPCC player of the year.
Dill also averaged 6 rebounds per game for a BC3 squad that finished 23-8 and was ranked as high as No. 7 in the NJCAA Division III.
He and Jerry Noll in 1996 became the first teammates in BC3 history to be selected as NJCAA Division III All-Americans in the same season.
“You don’t become an All-American all by yourself,” Dill said. “We had a great team, and coach allowed us to do what we could do and fined-tuned the things that would make you a better player. But at the end of the day, you are only as good as the people you are around.”
Two pairs of BC3 All-American teammates have followed Dill and Noll, one including golfer Carlsson in 2015 and the most recent, volleyball players Reisinger and Jack in December 2021.
College to honor 3 recent All-Americans
Reisinger, Jack and Pry, selected as an NJCAA Division III All-American in women’s basketball in March, will be honored Saturday.
Reisinger is a graduate of Lincoln High School in Ellwood City; Jack, of Knoch High and Pry, of Moniteau.
Reisinger led BC3’s volleyball team in 2021 with 205 kills and Jack, with 635 assists. Pry led BC3 and the NJCAA Division III with 19.6 rebounds per game and was fourth with 23.2 points.
Pease, a Butler graduate, won the PCAA championship in women’s tennis for BC3 in 1985, and was selected to the WPCC all-conference squad in women’s basketball in the same year.
Koenemund, a Blackhawk graduate, set BC3 single-game and single-season scoring records in men’s basketball in the 1993-94 season when he scored 55 points in a game and 918 for a Pioneers squad that finished as the PCAA runner-up.
Bajuszik, a Seneca Valley graduate, was a setter on BC3 volleyball teams who holds the program’s record with 1,360 career assists. She helped to lead the Pioneers to a combined 48-12 record over two seasons and to a national fifth-place finish in the 2002 NJCAA Division III tournament in Minnesota.
Carlsson, a Knoch graduate, is BC3’s only two-time NJCAA Division III All-American in golf. He received the prestigious postseason award by finishing in the Top 18 of the 72-hole national tournament in Chautauqua, N.Y., in 2014 and with teammate Thomas Dimun in 2015.
BC3’s Charles W. Dunaway Pioneer Hall of Fame includes Michael Cuscino, golf, 2019; Tom McConnell, men’s basketball, 2019; Megan (Smith) Nimmo, volleyball, 2019; Bryant Lewandowski, men’s basketball, 2018; Beckie Jo Higgins-Arey, softball, 2018; Michael Franko, cross-country, baseball and men’s basketball, 2018; Andrew Matonak, baseball, 2017; Missy (Haney) Schnur, volleyball, 2017; Robert Wilson, cross-country, 2017; and Walter Fitzpatrick, contributor, 2017; Thomas Beckett, men’s basketball and baseball coach, 2016; and John Stuper, men’s basketball and baseball, 2016.
