By Mike London
Salisbury Post
CHARLOTTE — Vivien “Vicki” Hamilton, who grew up in Salisbury, is one of the eight individuals in the North Carolina High School Athletic Association’s Hall of Fame Class of 2026.
On July 12, 1994, Hamilton was a groundbreaking hire by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System when she was placed in charge of all sports for boys and girls at 11 high schools and 23 middle schools. She was recognized as the first female AD in North Carolina.
Her father was G.W. “Bone” Hamilton. Hamilton’s surname led to him being known as “Hambone” in his days as a nose guard for the local high school football team. “Hambone” was shortened to “Bone” over the years.
“Bone” Hamilton was part owner of Salisbury’s minor league baseball teams that played at Newman Park. His daughter was a sports-crazy girl, but she encountered nothing but locked doors growing up in the 1960s.
She wanted to serve as a bat-girl for a Little League baseball team, but the coach told her in no uncertain terms “no girls allowed.” That gender-based rejection lit a fire under Hamilton, and she spent much of her life making sure women had opportunities to compete in sports, to coach sports and to administrate sports.
Because of who Hamilton’s father was, she was introduced to sports personalities at a young age. One of her biggest thrills occurred when Branch Rickey, the baseball executive who had signed Jackie Robinson, made a visit to Newman Park. Former MLB player turned TV personality Joe Garagiola dined with the Hamiltons on a visit to Salisbury. Hamilton became friends with Rowan County American Legion coach Joe Ferebee and with Salisbury Post sports editor Horace Billings. They mentored her.
She sold concessions at Newman Park and became a shrewd business person in her teens. She discovered, for instance, that adding a little extra salt to the popcorn greatly enhanced the sale of her soft drinks.
Salisbury was a Los Angeles Dodgers farm team in 1963. When the Dodger big wheels visited Newman Park, they asked the girl how she liked being part of a baseball family. Hamilton candidly told them she didn’t like it much at all because the Hamiltons never had been able to take a family vacation. The Dodgers did something about it. They paid for the Hamiltons to come out to California for two World Series games that year.
Hamilton was from a prominent family, a debutante. Salisbury’s Boyden High didn’t have a girls basketball team in her day, as it wasn’t deemed proper behavior for young ladies to sweat. Hamilton tried to transfer to a county school where the girls were allowed to hoop, but her transfer petition was denied, so her athletic efforts were limited to the Salisbury YMCA and the local tennis courts. She became an avid tennis player.
Bone Hamilton wanted his daughter to study the law, but she preferred the study of sports.
After high school, she went to Virginia Intermont College, a two-year women’s school. While she earned an associate degree, she played played basketball, field hockey and volleyball. She graduated in 1967.
Then she headed to the University of Oklahoma. Between Oklahoma and her transfer closer to home at Appalachian State, she launched a teaching and coaching career at Erwin Junior High in Granite Quarry in 1969.
In 1970, she received a bachelor’s degree in health and physical education from App State and was quickly hired as a teacher and coach at Moultrie High in Charleston, S.C.
She spent 1970-72 at Moultrie before accepting a two-year graduate teaching position at Appalachian State where she completed work on her masters degree. In Boone, she shared an office with men’s basketball coach Press Maravich (Pete’s father) and directed the girls at the big summer camps Maravich conducted in Pennsylvania.
Hamilton wasn’t sure what was coming next, but Maravich believed in her and made a call to University of South Carolina AD Paul Dietzel. Hamilton was granted an interview.
She was hired as a P.E. instructor and coached the volleyball and softball teams for the USC Gamecocks from 1974-76. Title IX was new, and colleges were still figuring out how to deal with the rapidly expanding world of female athletics, so there wasn’t any help for her. She had no assistant coaches. She washed her teams’ uniforms at home. She drove the team to road games in a van. She kept the stats. She coached both teams as a solo act for two years before she was informed that those teams would be coached moving forward by graduate assistants. She had loved the challenge and the interaction with student-athletes, but at the same time it was a relief.
That change in policy at South Carolina led to a crossroads and Hamilton’s switch from college coaching to school administration.
She went to work for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in 1977. She began as a curriculum coordinator. In 1980, she became an elementary school principal. Then she became a junior high principal, known for hugs, but also for tough love. If students didn’t do the job in the classroom, they didn’t play. If they didn’t behave, they got expelled. She won Principal of the Year awards.
Hamilton pivoted back to the sports world as AD for Charlotte-Mecklenburg in the summer of 1994 and served in that capacity until 2011.
A sign always hung outside her office door that left no doubt about who was working inside.
“All girls allowed,” it read, “and boys, too.”
The 2026 induction class also includes Michael Baker, Zoe Bell, Patty Evers, Greg Frey, BW Holt, Leo Lockhart and Bobby Dale Reynolds. They’ll be inducted in August in Greensboro.
