Hall of Fame
Virgil Zeigler’s first involvement with Southern California College was seeing the SCC bus at the corner of Ajo and South 12th in Tucson, Arizona. This was just a block from the Assembly of God Indian Church where he was pastoring. He knocked on the door and was greeted by faculty and students from the Science Department who were in the area to study the Sonora Desert. He invited them to bed down in the church that night before they headed into Mexico the next morning. That was the beginning of students staying in his home on their yearly trip to the Sonora Desert.
That early meeting set the stage for a long story that brought the Zeigler's to SCC/Vanguard, with his two daughters and son eventually attending the school. In 1981, Zeigler resigned from the church in Tucson and decided to visit his daughter and son who were juniors at SCC (his oldest daughter had just graduated the previous year). While on campus, President Wayne Krasis asked if he would be willing to fill in as Plant Engineer on an interim basis, and Zeigler said yes.
Succeeding at that, he was then asked to be the Church Relations Coordinator. After fulfilling this need, Virgil moved to the admissions office where he worked for a few years before he retired. “It was always a real joy to me to try to help recruit athletes for all the sports teams of SCC/Vanguard,” said Ziegler for the 2007 Hall of Fame program.
Virgil was the driving force behind developing the softball field that allowed SCC to add it to the roster of sports in 1986 . During his first year employed at the school, Virgil and his wife, Donna, traveled with the women's volleyball team and men's soccer team to Hawaii and over the next few years, they could be found traveling with a variety of teams to such places as Hawaii, Tennessee, Kansas City, and all around California.
From his beginning days and throughout his tenure at SCC, it was always the goal of the couple to attend every sporting event possible, home or away. He would also happily welcome teams to his home after events to feed them and foster a sense of community. That love also extended across campus, as they traveled with the Vanguard musicians wherever they went all over the United States, including Hawaii, Japan, Tahiti, Fiji, New Zealand, & Canada. It was because of his drive to support the department that an award was named in honor of the couple and given to the SCC Fan of Character for the year for a number of years.
In the program for his induction, former Athletic Director Bob Wilson said the following, "When you think of Virgil Ziegler you think of a servant leader. Virgil has given much of his life to Vanguard University in many different roles. He believes in the values that are taught at Vanguard University and he has been active in helping develop those values on campus. It is hard to imagine an athletic contest without Virgil and Donna present. They are both special people and it is indeed a great honor that the Vanguard University Athletic Department can bestow it’s greatest honor to Virgil Ziegler, Induction into the Vanguard University Hall of Fame."
His tradition on campus lives on. Virgil's daughter-in-law, Terry, has been a professor at Vanguard for a number of years and Terry's daughter, Callie, graduated from VU in 2016.
