The Cherokee County Sports Hall of Fame has announced its six-person class of 2012.

After inducting just two members in last year’s class, the Hall will welcome a much larger class in April — Brian Audia, Jolene Morris, George “Cotton” Frady, Bob Hasty, Craig King and John Rowland.

“We looked at the nomination and election process, and we made tweaks to it in a situation where we would not have that situation come up again,” said board member Scott Webb, himself a 2008 inductee. “We didn’t want to give off the impression that we didn’t have enough worthy candidates to be in the Cherokee County Sports Hall of Fame. We changed the process to have a little bit larger class.”

The six-person class is the largest since seven were inducted in 2007.

The induction ceremony will take place April 20 at 6:30 p.m. at First Baptist Church in Canton.

On top of adding its six inductees, the Hall of Fame will also honor Cherokee High School’s 1972-73 girls basketball team, which won the Class AAA state championship and finished with a 25-1 overall record.

Although the ceremony has traditionally recognized a team at each one of its ceremonies, there will be a new wrinkle this year. Each of Cherokee’s six high schools will nominate an “Athlete of the Year” to be recognized by the Hall of Fame.

“We want to do some things to recognize the athletes in our county,” Webb said. “We don’t want to step outside of our charter, but we do want to make sure that we are recognizing some current athletes as well as the inductees into the Hall of Fame.”

Although the Hall of Fame is filled mostly with athletes and coaches from Canton and Cherokee high schools, this year’s class will include two Etowah High School graduates.

Audia, a 1988 graduate, lettered in five sports (football, basketball, baseball, track and field and golf), but baseball was his strongest sport as he earned a scholarship to play at Auburn-Montgomery. He started all four years at AUM and was part of the team that finished second at the 1990 NAIA World Series.

The Audia family has a long athletic history in the county. Brian’s father, Dave, was the longtime Sequoyah baseball coach before retiring in 2004. His brother, Kelly, spent 13 years as Sequoyah’s volleyball coach before leaving in 2010 to assist wife Tami at Georgia State.

Rowland graduated from Etowah in 1987, and starred as a cross country runner and wrestler. In wrestling, he was the Class AAAA state champion in ’87 with an undefeated 30-0 record.

Rowland earned a scholarship to run at Georgia State, where was an all-conference honoree in 1988 and ’90, and he later returned to Georgia State as the its coach from 1995-2001. The Panthers won seven straight Trans America Athletic Conference championships under Rowland, and he was named the TAAC Coach of the Year six times.

Hasty, born in Canton in 1896, pitched six seasons for the Philadelphia Athletics, where he played under Hall of Fame manager Connie Mack. Hasty, who died in 1972, won 29 games in 146 major-league games from 1919-24

Morris was a 1984 graduate of Cherokee, where was an all-state softball player. After earning a scholarship to Kennesaw State, she was a three-time all-conference selection and part of two NAIA national championships.

Frady graduated from Cherokee in 1961 and was a baseball standout for the Warriors and earned a scholarship to Georgia after being an all-state pitcher his senior year. With the Bulldogs, he started 25 games and led the starting rotation in 1965 with a 2.91 ERA and 32 strikeouts in 36 innings pitched.

King was a golf standout who graduated from Cherokee in 1982. As a Warrior, he was a two-time team MVP and earned a scholarship to Kennesaw State, though he also played at Reinhardt and Shorter. He played professionally in the Tommy Armour Tour from 1992-94, then became a PGA Tour caddie from 1994-97. From 1992-2004, he was a PGA professional instructor.

The Hall of Fame receives nominations from the community, and the primary criteria is that a former player must be at least 40 years old, and a former coach 50 or older. Once the list of nominees is culled down to a smaller number, a nominee must receive 75 percent of the vote from the Hall of Fame board to earn induction.

The Hall of Fame is located within the G. Cecil Pruett Community Center Family YMCA in Canton.