Those who have walked through the west entrance of Collins Center recently may have noticed a change to the facility just before entering the gymnasium.

Over the past couple of months, Assistant Athletic Director Andrew Patch and junior Nate Byarlay have worked on refurnishing the Baker University Athletic Hall of Fame.

The athletic department has wanted to incorporate the additions to the hall of fame for over a decade, but the recent success of the sports at Baker influenced the athletic department to take action.

“It started as an idea, and then I approached it with Andrew, our assistant (athletic director), and wanted him to take on that project,” Athletic Director Theresa Yetmar said. “We were fortunate to have Nate Byarlay on as an intern during that interterm session. (Patch and Byarlay) brainstormed together and they figured out a few different forms and layouts and brought that to me and I gave them the green light and they ran with it.”

One of the main emphases of the changes to the hall of fame dealt with organizing it into different categories.

“Before, it was kind of disorganized and you couldn’t really follow Baker’s history very much, so we wanted to have a theme and tell a story with each of the displays,” Byarlay said. “So we added a section honoring some of the Baker legends … four legends we just considered to be huge contributors to Baker athletics. Those four are Emil S. Liston, Mike McCarthy, Charlie Richard and James Irick.”

While much of the work on display for each Baker legend has been completed, Patch would still like to add in information to help explain the accomplishments of each individual.

Three of the other newly featured displays include the development of women’s athletics over the past few decades, the equipment different athletes have used over the years and the history of Liston Stadium, which is displayed in the middle of the hall of fame.

To go along with the themed sections, the hall of fame has a primary section to highlight the achievements of Baker athletics in general.

“The main display is just Baker’s past success,” Byarlay said. “All of the championships for football we have won and all of the other sports are in there from the past years up to the present success. We’ve had a whole lot of success recently. Pretty much every team on campus has done really well, so we just wanted to show the success (Baker) has had over the past 100 years of athletics.”

One of the main goals of Patch and Yetmar is for the hall of fame to be used as a recruiting device for high school and transfer student-athletes who are visiting Baker.

“I think any time that you can showcase what you do as an institution to a recruit is huge,” Patch said. “It is going to have a huge impact on being able to create a great experience for a recruit. It is going to really have a positive impact on having those recruits sign and come here because it is showcasing what we do here.”

Numerous hours of brainstorming, researching, planning and organizing went in to transforming the hall of fame, but Patch knows that working on it will be a continuous process.

“We’ve now moved in the right direction of establishing the hall of fame area as a place that we can showcase what we do here at Baker and it is going to be an ongoing challenge for us to continually add to that and keep it up to date,” Patch said.