Dwayne Hanberry grew four inches and gained 70 pounds during the two years at Pearl River Community College that recently earned the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference commissioner a place in that school’s sports hall of fame.

“I was a late bloomer,” he said of his two years at the Mississippi school where he played basketball and averaged 12 points and 8.5 rebounds per game during his sophomore season before transferring to Oglethorpe.

Hanberry, who joins his dad David (Goose) Hanberry as Pearl River’s first father-son inductees into the hall of fame, was honored during the school’s homecoming last Saturday.

He fondly remembers his time at the school, where he started out studying engineering but switched to business.

“When I got out of high school, nobody expressed an interest in me,” he told the Pearl River public relations staff in a news release. “My dad talked to Billy Holmes (the head coach at the time) and he let me walk on. They gave me a half scholarship to stay around, keep statistics and be a student assistant coach. That sounded good to me.”

It was his move to Oglethorpe, an SCAC member, that set him on the path that eventually led him to join the conference’s staff in 1995 as sports information director – though he first worked for eight years in a men’s clothing store.

Hanberry became SCAC commissioner in 2008.