THOMASVILLE — While in the Detroit Tigers organization, Bobby Link got a phone call. It was from Sports Illustrated requesting an interview.

Initially, Link, a Brookwood pitching standout in the 1980s, thought it was his friends playing a hoax on him.

He felt similarly when Bill Raney called from the Thomasville-Thomas County Hall of Fame a few months ago to inform him he was a 2014 inductee.

And just as with the SI interview request, this phone call was for real.

Link, Tracy (Linton) Broom, Johnny Parrish, Doug Mills, William Andrews and Ken Conner were inducted into the Hall of Fame Thursday night at Thomasville High School.

Link’s fellow five inductees had the same feeling of awe when they got the news.

“When I got that phone call, I was overflowing with emotion,” Broom said at the reception before the 21st annual awards banquet. Broom led her Central Yellow Jackets to the Class AAA championship in 1988. The team lost, but Broom still lists it as one of her most memorable experiences, along with her accomplishments on the track team.

“It makes you speechless that your community would honor you like this,” said Parrish, a member of the 1974 Thomasville national championship football team. “It’s such a unique experience. It’s very humbling.”

The six were all nominated by community members over the years and voted in by the board as the class of 2014. They milled about at the reception with family before being honored at the banquet held at Thomasville High School.

“I have no words to describe it,”said Mills, a three-year letterman in football for Central. “It’s beyond what I ever thought of.”

No one made the rounds more than Andrews, the former Thomasville standout running back who, as Raney joked at the banquet, sometimes only played a half since the game was already put away. He went on to set records with the Atlanta Falcons after being drafted in the third round of the 1979 draft out of Auburn.

“A lot of these people (at the reception) poured their spirit into me to make me the person I am today,” Andrews said. “So I take the time to talk with them.”

And no one had more family at the event then Ken Conner, who was inducted for his contributions as a Central football, basketball and baseball player.

“Shock. Happy. Proud. That about sums it up,” Conner said.

Conner is now part of a father-son tandem in the Hall of Fame. His favorite memories come from his time as a little boy when his father, Eugene, was a Central coach and he was the ball boy. His father was there for the reception and ceremony, plus about 20 other family members he said have been with him for everything he does.

After his induction Thursday night, during which he thanked the teachers, coaches, YMCA staff and altogether “village” of Thomasville that raised him, his family is larger still.

“It’s an honor to be a part of the family I looked up to when I was young,” he said. “I was raised around Thomasville sports. That’s why I feel so honored. I feel blessed.”

Conner told the banquet crowd he was proud to be in a class with the likes of Andrews, who his family would watch on TV after church on Sundays.

That, he said, was what made Thomasville so special: this success is what young people grow up around. It’s what they know.

The 2014 Thomasville-Thomas County student athletes of the year likely share the same outlook. Brookwood’s Madeleine Eason and Taylor Patterson, Central’s Katie Johnson and Austin Bryant, Thomasville’s Danisha Jones and Ryan Bush, and Thomas University’s Kaley Clark and Andrew Berg were honored at the beginning of the ceremony for their success in sports, in the classroom and in the community.

For now, they have a plaque to hang on their future college dorm walls. Two decades from now, they might receive a call asking them to come back home as a Hall of Fame inductee and join the six talented athletes the hall inducted Thursday night.