SWOSU Athletic Hall of Fame member and longtime supporter Valerie Fariss has been selected to receive the Cecil Perkins Service Award for the year 2025.
Fariss will be recognized for the award next week at the SWOSU athletic department’s annual All-Sports Awards Ceremony, held on Tuesday, April 29th at the Pioneer Event Center. This year, Lucille’s Hotel & Restaurant and ASAP General Stores are the presenting sponsors of the event.
“Cecil was too good to me as a player at Southwestern and was also so kind to my family throughout the years,” said Fariss. “But it wasn’t just me, he was good to everyone he came in contact with. He was the epitome of service, always going above and beyond to make sure people were cared for. I am honored and appreciative to be selected as a recipient of the service award named after him.”
Fariss, a former national champion for the Lady Bulldog basketball team, is also a SWOSU Athletic Hall of Fame member, inducted in the Class of 2008, as well as a longtime member of the SWOSU Athletic Association. She served as President of the Athletic Association from 2013-18, has spent well over a decade on the association’s Board of Directors, and is currently serving her second term as Secretary.
Aside from formal duties and titles linked to the athletic department, Fariss is also widely known to this day for sponsoring meals for SWOSU athletic teams, her help with SWOSU Rodeo, and the creation of a youth golf camp in Cordell that has many ties to the SWOSU golf program.
After Fariss’ Hall of Fame playing career ended at Southwestern in 1994, she became a teacher and coach in Carnegie, Oklahoma for a year before moving to Clinton in ‘95 for similar opportunities. Fariss spent nine years in Clinton and says her former players she coached who went on to play at SWOSU were a large reason why she remained so plugged into the SWOSU athletic scene.
Opportunities to support SWOSU athletes then began presenting themselves. Fariss first helped feed the football team hot dogs when they didn’t have caf- eteria access over the summer, which snowballed into basketball teams needing meals over Christmas Break, then postseason meals for qualifying teams, and so on. She did the same for the SWOSU rodeo team, always finding a way to cook and supply food for the team. Fariss might be most known for her chicken spaghetti, a meal she’s commonly supplied through the years to a very welcoming SWOSU women’s basketball team.
“Being from a small town, I grew up where everybody supported each other and that’s just how it was. The businesses supported the school and vice versa. We always chipped in and helped no matter if it was athletics or something else. If you wanted to get something done, everybody just had to jump in and make it happen as a group and community.”
In 2015, now living in Cordell, Fariss became involved with helping start up the sport of golf at the school. She eventually created a summer youth golf clinic at Cordell and reached out to SWOSU Golf Head Coach Brad Fleetwood to pair up with the college teams for help. Through the years, Fariss has had numerous SWOSU golfers provide instruction and presence at the camp and has even had two former Cordell natives go on to play golf under Fleetwood on scholarship.
Present day, Fariss continues to serve on the SWOSU Athletic Association Board of Directors and help where she can. She can still be caught serving, sponsoring, or helping organize a meal that will feed SWOSU athletes. Cordell’s summer youth golf camp also continues to be held each summer.
“I had such a great experience at Southwestern as a student-athlete. The wonderful people that were there, and the little things they did to support us, made it special. I always felt like I needed to make sure I did those same little things once I was able to so that the kids after me felt the same level of support that I did.”
This is the 13th year that the Cecil Perkins Service Award has been presented. The award is named for Perkins, the former SWOSU Athletic Director who passed away in September 2013. Perkins helped pioneer the direction of the Bulldogs’ athletic programs for more than a quarter century, elevating the SWOSU Athletic Department to the NCAA Division II level. His philosophy of putting the student-athlete first in any decision has led to hundreds of individual success stories that continue to positively impact the new generation of students, coaches, and teams at SWOSU and beyond.