Bob Hentzen broke the barrier. Now, it’s time for another wall to topple.

Earlier this year, Hentzen became the first sports writer inducted into the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame. The second sports writer selected should be Barbara Caywood.

In the early 1960s, Caywood overcame the prevailing prejudice against women sports writers with her own brand of benevolent obstinacy.

At a time when there were as many female sports writers as there were male sewing writers, Caywood made national headlines when she was refused admittance into the Kansas University football press box. She became the first legitimate member of the working media to be barred by KU officials because she was a woman : and the last. They let her in the next time.

That in itself should be enough to put a foot in the door of the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame, but she also spent 24 years as a sports writer for the Hutchinson News. In those two dozen years, she became a big fish in a small pond – a friend and confidant of just about every coach and player who showed up each March for the National Junior College Athletic Assn. basketball tournament.

Then, Caywood abruptly folded her Salt City tent and returned to her native Florida, where she has spent the last 21 years writing about high school sports for Florida Today, a daily newspaper that serves the area on the upper Atlantic coast.

Now, at the age of 68 and after 46 years as a sports writer, Caywood has called it a career. Forty-six years. Think of it. I’d wager that 99 percent of male sports writers don’t last that long in the business. Ask her son, Kurt, executive sports editor of the Topeka Capital-Journal, if he plans to pound out sports copy that long, and he’ll just wince.

Yes, the Caywoods are indeed the only known mother-son sports writers in the history of the genre. As an aside, I should point out that Barbara Caywood’s sports-writing career actually covers only about 44 years, because she sat out for nearly two years to raise Kurt.

I know this because I’m the guy who filled in for her. They couldn’t find another woman sports writer, so the Hutch News moguls culled me off the general reporting staff and tossed me into the breech.

Barbara graciously taught me the ropes. She mentored me on how to take play-by-play during basketball games, how to keep a running account of football games, etc. – methods I use to this day.

A day after she retired last week, Caywood flew to Tampa and was inducted into the Florida High School Hall of Fame. She was cited her many contributions to youth sports, particularly football and track. That pushed one of my buttons and made me wonder why she isn’t in the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame, too.

I was delighted when the late Hentzen, a longtime friend who saw athletics through rose-colored glasses and admonished everyone to “be a booster,” was named to the Sunflower State sports shrine. Hentzen, who spent 38 years at the Topeka C-J, truly was a sports writing icon.

Caywood was a pioneer who would have gravitated to icon status had she spent all of her writing career in Kansas. Still, I think she made enough of a contribution to warrant inclusion in the Wichita-based shrine.

Over the years, countless Kansans have moved to Florida to retire, but not many Floridians spend retirement days in Kansas. All that means is Caywood will be bucking another trend. She plans to fly to Lawrence from time to time to watch her grandson Jack, a ninth grader at West Junior High, participate in football, wrestling and baseball, and granddaughter Madeline, a fifth-grader, play soccer and softball.

And when she isn’t in Lawrence, Caywood will be covering high school sports for Florida Today.

Hey, wait a minute. I thought she retired.

“She’s actually just semi-retired,” her son Kurt told me. “She’ll still work for the paper on a contractual basis. Basically, it means she can cover what she wants to cover.”

Sounds to me like the only way to make Barbara Caywood quit sports writing is to hide her pad and pencil.