Hershberger Gridiron Classic set for July 10 at BVU golf course
The July 10 outing will bring Beaver football alumni back to Lake Creek, where last year’s field raised $92,000 for the Hershberger football fund.
The Hershberger Gridiron Classic will again pull Beaver football alumni and supporters back to Buena Vista University Golf Course at Lake Creek on Friday, July 10, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., with the day serving both as a reunion and a fundraiser for BVU football. The event supports the Jim & Floy Hershberger Football Fund, tying a summer gathering in Storm Lake to one of the university’s most durable athletic legacies.
That connection still matters because the classic is not just a golf outing. It is a recurring source of money and attention for BVU athletics, and it brings former players and friends of the program back into Buena Vista County. BVU says the outing has become a place where alumni reconnect, support the football program and keep the Hershberger name in front of new generations of Beavers.
Jim Hershberger is the reason the event carries that weight. BVU’s athletics Hall of Fame credits him as the program’s all-time winningest football coach, with a record of 121-61-1 and three league titles over 20 seasons at the helm. BVU football materials also say he coached the Beavers from 1970 to 1989, then served as athletic director until 1994. The annual event was originally founded by Coach Joe Hadachek as the BVU Gridiron Classic in the late 1990s, then renamed by coaches Steve Osterberg and Jay Anderson in Hershberger’s honor.
The fundraising side has grown into a major part of the story. BVU says the Jim & Floy Hershberger Football Endowment Fund was established in 2002 by former players Dan Phillips ’77, Brad Jones ’77, Doug Thompson ’81 and the late Tim Anderson ’83. In 2023, the outing drew the largest field in years and raised more than $20,000. In 2024, 132 golfers took part and more than $56,000 was raised. In 2025, 109 alumni and guests from nine states brought in $92,000 for the Jim and Floy Hershberger Football Fund and BVU athletics efforts.
The setting has also become part of the draw. BVU Lake Creek, a challenging 18-hole semi-private course in Storm Lake, was named the Iowa Golf Association’s 18-hole Golf Course of the Year for 2021. For BVU, the July event blends athletics history, alumni traffic and local visibility into one of the summer’s most established dates on the campus calendar.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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