Jennifer Drudge & Chrissy Steffen honored as Hall of Famers
Two of Indiana’s all-time great basketball players with Carmel ties received major honors on Tuesday.
Jennifer (Marlow) Drudge, a longtime coach for the Greyhounds, was announced as one of the 10 people in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame’s 21st Women’s induction class Tuesday morning. Then on Tuesday evening, Chrissy Steffen, an Indiana All-Star and one of the players who led Carmel to its 2008 Class 4A state championship was inducted into the Hamilton County Basketball Hall of Fame prior to tipoff of the Greyhounds’ game with Lawrence Central.
Drudge graduated from Rushville High School in 1995. She scored 1,306 points in her career and averaged over 20 points per game her senior season. She was selected as First team All-sectional, Regional and All-State her senior season, while also being named an Indiana All-Star. Drudge played tennis as well, finishing as the 1994 state doubles runner-up.
Drudge played collegiately at Butler University where right away, she was honored on the All-Newcomer Team her freshman season. Her junior and senior seasons she was named First Team All-Conference and All-Defensive Team as a senior. Drudge was the head coach at Carmel from 2001-2004 and an assistant with the Greyhounds in 200-01 and again from 2009-13. She was inducted into the Butler Hall of Fame in 2013, while being named to their All-Centennial team. She has taught chemistry at Carmel High School since 2000 and has been the department chair since 2010.
“It’s hard to put into words,” said Drudge. “It’s not something that I ever really dreamed of happening and it’s not something that I expected to happen.”
Drudge said after receiving the phone call, she felt an “overwhelming feeling of gratefulness” to the people that “helped me get to where I was in basketball, tons of unbelievable people in my home community of Rush County,” who supported her all the way through high school and college, and then her Carmel family as well.
“I just had so many people to help me through my basketball life,” said Drudge.
Longtime Carmel coach Jennifer
(Marlow) Drudge was announced as one of the 10 people in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame’s 21st Women’s induction class Tuesday morning. Drudge played for Rushville, graduating in 1995, and was named as an Indiana All-Star that year. (Richie Hall)
Record holder
Steffen graduated from Carmel in 2009. She set the school career scoring record for the Greyhounds, totaling 1,427 points. During her junior year, she led the Metropolitan Conference in scoring, and would go on to lead the ‘Hounds to the state title. In the championship game against South Bend Washington, Steffen scored 31 points, which tied the 4A state title game record. She was named the state tournament MVP.
Steffen was an Indiana All-Star her junior and senior years, a three-time First Team All-MIC and three-time First Team All-County selection. After her senior year, Steffen was a First Team All-State honoree and was a McDonald’s All-American nominee.
Steffen went on to play college at Bowling Green State University, graduating in 2013. She finished her college career with 1,245 points and 184 3-point field goals, placing her fourth on the 3-pointer list. Steffen was named to the All-Mid-American Conference Second team twice and the Academic All-MAC team three times.
While receiving all of those accolades and winning games were fun, Steffen said that some of her best memories come from “the people that were involved. Coaches, teammates, fans, family. Really, at the end of the day, I remember the relationships that we had.”
Steffen returned to Bowling Green State to work as an Academic Advisor and Planner, after working in Athletic Academic advisor and counselor positions at the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Tennessee. She said there several transferable skills that she used from basketball.
“A lot of times my job is juggling a lot and figuring out different types of puzzles and how to manage different times,” said Steffen. She said that while working in athletics over the past eight years, there were “a lot of challenges,” so she learned how to be “resilient and persevere through some of those times.”
Drudge was there to watch Steffen’s induction ceremony.
“In a lot of way, it’s really more fun to watch other people get inducted in the Hall of Fame,” said Drudge. “I got to see Chrissy grow as a basketball player from the time she was in elementary school, so when I was coaching at Carmel, Chrissy was coming to our youth basketball camps, and we knew from the time she was in third and fourth grade that she had a chance to be a really good player, and so it’s been really awesome to watch her develop as a basketball player and as a person all these years. She’s just a fantastic person.”