Reggie Benson
Class of 2026
Reggie Benson still has the letter.
It was sent by Phillip Marshall, his former sports editor at The Montgomery Advertiser and later to be a colleague at The Huntsville Times. Upon Reggie’s departure from The Advertiser, Marshall wrote: “You made more friends for this newspaper than anybody I’ve ever met with our paper.”
“And,” Benson says, picking up the story, “we tried to do the same thing with A&M and UAH, and I think we did.”
Benson, in his 23 remarkable years with The Huntsville Times with a primary focus on coverage of Alabama A&M and UAH, was prolific, professional, fair, accurate and talented. All of that led to a true connection to his readers, and with his subjects and sources. (As if that gig wasn’t busy enough, he kept tabs on developments at Jacksonville State, North Alabama, the SWAC, the Gulf South Conference and, come summer, whatever the latest iteration of indoor football was.)
To travel from press box to sidelines at Alabama A&M’s Louis Crews Stadium in the waning moments of a football game was to travel a path among some of those “friends” he’d made for the newspaper. It was a mixed chorus of praise, encouragement to write fearlessly or, depending upon the course of that day’s game, criticism of coaching and those in uniform.
It was destined to continue the next morning as Benson attended his beloved First Missionary Baptist Church with the revered Rev. Dr. Julius Scruggs. It was up to Dr. Scruggs to sermonize but Reggie was “holding my own court (talking about A&M). It still goes on today after a big football game or a big basketball game. I’m having to say, ‘I’m not covering the games now.’”
His name has inexorably been tied to Alabama A&M. Even to a second generation. Briefly his son Jordan, now sports information director at Tuskegee, was an A&M SID. Jordan is one of two sons for Reggie and wife Pat. Justin is in his second year as a contract specialist with the Corps of Engineers and also serves as the junior varsity boys basketball coach at Jemison High School, where he also doubles as a varsity assistant.
Benson is combining both of his son’s careers into one busy life for himself, having landed nicely on his feet after the demise of The Huntsville Times. He serves as sports information director for Oakwood University and is a PE teacher at Providence Elementary School.
He grew up in Prattville, the youngest of the late Askew and Ruth Benson’s 10 children, five boys, five girls, eight of whom graduated college.
Benson was a football standout at Prattville High, a running back with a couple of 1,000-plus yardage seasons. He then went to the University of the South (Sewanee) and was first-team All-CAC as freshman. But he left Sewanee after two seasons to move home as his dad grew ill.
He enrolled at Troy State, then took a first step into journalism, having been inspired several years earlier. Phil Snow, the Montgomery sportscaster, spoke at a Prattville football banquet and “when I walked out of that banquet, I wanted to be a journalist.” Pausing for a laugh, he says, “I tell people, look, I thought I was a good-looking guy, so I thought I'd be good for TV.”
Instead, he wound up doing air shifts playing R&B music for Prattville’s WQIM-FM radio station and covering high school sports for the Prattville Progress. From there, a step up to The Gadsden Times, then the Advertiser, and finally to his Hall of Fame, friends-making career in Huntsville.
“When John Pruett hired me, he said we want to cover Alabama A&M as close as we can, like we cover Alabama and Auburn, even though we don’t have the manpower,” Benson says.
So, sure enough in 2007, with ambitious coverage and financial resources in no short supply at The Times, the college writers were dispatched to the hometowns of the coaches on their respective beats, to learn more about the environments and influences that made them tick.
Benson flew to Baltimore, the home town of A&M coach Anthony Jones, another of our 2026 inductees.
“I walk into the hotel,” he recalls, “and it’s in the midst of being robbed. I just kind of tried to play it cool.”
-- Mark McCarter
