Former KU basketball coach Ted Owens to receive prestigious award in home state
Former University of Kansas men’s basketball coach Ted Owens will receive the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Hall’s highest honor, at a black-tie banquet set for Aug. 4 at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
Owens — he turns 96-years-old on July 16 — was inducted in Oklahoma’s Hall as a member of the Class of 2009. The Hollis, Oklahoma native who now lives in Tulsa was inducted into the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame, also in 2009.
“The Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame is proud to honor Ted Owens with the Lifetime Achievement Award (formerly called the Jim Thorpe Lifetime Achievement Award). This award is the highest award presented by the association and recognizes a lifetime of achievement by people who set the examples that influence others to strive for the highest goals and who blaze the trails which leave behind the pathways for others to follow,” a Hall official said in a news release.
“This award is not an annual honor and is presented with much thought and value towards a recipient’s overall life of goodwill.”
Past lifetime achievement award winners include Johnny Bench, Lynne Draper, Abe Lemons, George Nigh, Samuel Lloyd Noble, Tom Osborne, Steve Owens, Allie Reynolds, Chris Schenkel and Barry Switzer.
Asked about the lifetime achievement honor, Owens, who was a standout basketball player at the University of Oklahoma preceding his long career in coaching, told The Star on Friday: “I am just blown away. I am so pleased to be honored alongside so many people that I admire and respect.”
In 2009 after his enshrinement in the Oklahoma Sports Hall, Owens stated: “Anybody in life, no matter how hard you work, you cannot be successful without help and support of others. My parents, players, assistant coaches, family and friends. I’m so thankful.”
Owens’ KU teams went 348-182 in 19 seasons. He is the fourth-winningest coach in school history.
During his tenure at Kansas, Owens’ teams won six Big Eight Conference championships and advanced to the NCAA Tournament seven times. He coached two Final Four teams, while his 1968 squad lost to Dayton in the 1968 NIT Finals.
A five-time Big Eight Conference coach of the year, Owens was Basketball Weekly’s national coach of the year in 1978.
“As (current KU coach) Bill Self said, we are all just caretakers of the program during our time. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity (from 1964 to ’83),” Owens said of coaching at KU.
Self was inducted in the Oklahoma Sports Hall in 2013.
Owens coached at Oral Roberts University and in Israel following his time at Kansas. He served as the basketball coach at Metro Christian Academy in Tulsa for five years and as athletic director at St. Leo University in Florida for four years.
He returned to Tulsa and worked as an investment adviser for 10 years before retiring.
“I had some time to dream while I was hoeing cotton back on that (family) farm in southwest Oklahoma,” Owens told the Oklahoma Historical Society of his beginnings in Hollis. “But my dreams were never so great as to imagine what I have been privileged to do during my lifetime.”
This year’s Oklahoma Hall of Fame inductees are: Ken Hayes, Ann Pitts-Turner, Don Porter, Enos Semore and Wes Welker. Owens will be formally honored with the lifetime achievement award alongside the Class of 2025 members at the induction ceremony.
One can purchase tickets at the Hall of Fame’s website.
