TEMPE, Ariz. (FWAA) – Dan Foster, long-time South Carolina sports writer and editor, has won the 2003 Bert McGrane Award.

Foster was selected as the winner by a panel of previous McGrane Award winners.

He will receive a plaque and special recognition during a breakfast at the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind., in August.

Dan Foster

The Bert McGrane Award, which serves as the Football Writers Association of America Hall of Fame, was established in 1974. The award honors an FWAA member who has performed great service to the organization and the game of college football. It is named after McGrane, who was the executive secretary of the organization from the early 1940s until 1973.

Foster was president of the FWAA in 1986, the same year the FWAA initiated a Coach of the Year banquet in Houston.

He is a native of Greenville, S.C., and graduate of Furman University. He started his writing career with the Greenville News-Piedmont in 1948. He spent three years in the United States Air Force and then returned to the newspaper in 1953 and became sports editor of the afternoon Piedmont in 1958.

He later served as sports editor of the Greenville News from 1968 until his retirement in 2000.

Foster still writes two columns a month in Greenville because he is the local sports historian. A retired Air Force Reserve colonel (1982), Foster was inducted into the United States Basketball Writers Hall of Fame in 1999. And in December 2000, he received the Order of the Palmetto, the highest award the governor of South Carolina can authorize.

Foster is currently on the advisory board of the Salvation Army Chapter in Greenville. He is a trustee on churches' program for housing and the homeless. He was named the Greenville Lions Club Citizen of the Year in 2002.

Foster, a father of two sons from his first marriage, was widowed in 1992. But he married Kay Floyd in February, 2003. She is the widow of Darrell Floyd, the Furman basketball star who led the nation in scoring in 1955 and '56.

Foster's name will also be placed on a plaque in the rotunda of the College Football Hall of Fame with the previous McGrane Award winners.

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• Bert McGrane Award