NEW ORLEANS (FWAA) – Dave Sittler, a staple of journalism in the Oklahoma and Nebraska areas for more than a half century, has been named the 39th winner of the FWAA's Bert McGrane Award.

The Bert McGrane Award, symbolic of the association's Hall of Fame, is presented to an FWAA member who has performed great service to the organization and/or the writing profession. It is named after McGrane, a Des Moines, Iowa, writer who was the executive secretary of the FWAA from the early 1940s until 1973.

Sittler, the 2001 FWAA president and a member since 1973, first proposed the idea of the Volney Meece Scholarship (named after the FWAA's late executive director) in the mid-1990s. He has been the only selection chairman the award has known. The annual $1,000 grant, awarded since 1997 and renewable for up to four years, is given to a deserving son or daughter of an FWAA member.

Sittler, 66, recently retired from his full-time job as columnist at the Tulsa World, but plans to still work part-time for the paper and continue to appear on the Tulsa Sports Animal radio show.

A 1971 University of Nebraska graduate, Sittler has worked for five papers and has covered college football as either a beat writer or columnist in Nebraska and Oklahoma from Nebraska coach Bob Devaney to Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops.

Sittler began his career at the Lincoln Journal-Star in 1971 and moved over to the Omaha World-Herald in 1978 and stayed until 1985. From there he went to Tulsa, where he worked for The Tribune from 1985 to 1992. Sittler spent seven years at The Oklahoman before landing at his final stop, The Tulsa World, in 1999.

A native of Hebron, Neb., Sittler has won numerous local and national writing awards and has been elected 10 times as the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Oklahoma Sportswriter of the Year. He claimed the Hebron High School Distinguished Alumni Award in 2003 and two years later was inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

Sittler and wife Ann, a native of Australia, have two grown children, Geoff and Brian.

The Football Writers Association of America, a non-profit organization founded in 1941, consists of more than 1,200 men and women who cover college football for a living. The membership includes journalists, broadcasters and publicists, as well as key executives in all the areas that involve the game. The FWAA works to govern areas that include gameday operations, major awards and its annual All-America team. For more information about the FWAA and its award programs, contact Steve Richardson at tiger@fwaa.com or 972-713-6198.

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• Bert McGrane Award