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Sonny Allen

The coaches who knew Sonny Allen best voted him as NABC College Division II National Coach of the Year in 1975 when his Running' Monarchs won the NCAA national Division II basketball championship by defeating New Orleans University, 76-74. The Associated Press also voted him as the 1975 Small College Coach of the Year.

Those coast-to-coast honors capped a remarkable 10-year tenure during which he lifted Old Dominion from a 7-17 record playing a mixture of Division III and II opponents to one second-place national finish in Division II in 1971 and then a 25-6 record against Division I and II teams and the national title.

His charter at Old Dominion, beginning with the 1965-66 season, had been to field teams worthy of a growing college and a mushrooming multi-city metropolitan area. To Achieve that goal, he began granting athletic scholarships to Monarch cagers, a first at this school. Among these athletes were to be Academic All-American Gray Eubank, and first team AP/ UPI/NABC All-Americans Dave Twardzik, Joel Copeland and Wilson Washington.

Emphasizing the fast-break basketball that had been his game since his high school days in West Virginia, Allen guided 10 ODU teams to a 181-94 record.

Before Sonny left Old Dominion for Southern Methodist University at the end of the 1974-75 championship season, his teams had reached post-season tournaments in six of his last seven seasons.

In the 1972-73 season, Allen engineered wins over five former national champions and lost by only one point to Virginia Tech, who would go on and capture the 1973 National Invitation Tournament.

His clubs also won three of the first five Kiwanis-Old Dominion Classics, despite fields that included Auburn, Baylor, Arizona, Yale, Virginia Tech, California, Indiana, Stanford, Rice and Tulane.

Such success was not unexpected. Sonny Allen had been a 6-0 wingman on a 1958 Marshall University team that led the nation's colleges in scoring. And under his direction, Marshall High School was 17-2 before he returned to Marshall University as a coach and guided five freshmen teams to 68 wins – the last 26 in a row. His 1967-68 Old Dominion team still holds the school scoring record, averaging 98.2 points per game.