Sports Editor Chris Kuhagen hands out his team MVP, Offensive MVP, Defensive MVP and Breakout Player of the Year for the 2009 national championship football team.

The 2009 season will not be forgotten anytime soon. It was a season the UW-Whitewater football team dominated for much of the year. It was a season where numerous team and individual records were broken. And it was a season that ended in the most dramatic fashion on Division III’s grandest stage.

When Lance Leipold was introduced as the new head coach three years ago, he knew what awaited him. The Warhawks were coming off the best seasons in school history advancing to the national championship game in 2005 and 2006. “The bar has been raised here the last couple of years,” Leipold said at his first news conference after taking over for legendary head coach Bob Berezowitz in 2007. As hard as it might have been to do, Leipold has raised that bar even further.

The pieces have been in place all season. Now, more than three months after the football team’s opening game in Dickinson, N.D., the puzzle is almost complete. This final piece to the Warhawks’ perfect campaign and second national championship in the last three years could be put into place Saturday in Salem, Va.

Senior quarterback Jeff Donovan's career hasn't always been the smoothest. The spotlight has been on him since his freshman year and now, in his final year as the quarterback of one of the top-ranked football offenses in the country, he is shining in that spotlight.

Myles McKay lives by one motto and everyone seems to know it. “I can’t accept anyone working harder than me,” said McKay, who as a senior last year led the men’s basketball team to the second round of the NCAA tournament. “I can’t accept it. Hard work is everything to me.” Not a bad motto for where it has taken him: It got him a Division I basketball scholarship out of high school.