The Wolfpacker: An Independent Magazine Covering NC State Sports
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1544864
28 ■ THE WOLFPACKER under the guidance of fellow midwest- erner Gus Tebell, who became NC State's head football and basketball coach in 1925. Tebell's football Wolfpack and basketball Red Terrors won Southern Conference championships in both sports (1927 and '29 respectively), with All-American Jack McDowall and Warren starring for both teams. After his graduation in 1931, Warren caught the coaching bug and held the head basketball position for one season at Virginia Tech, then returned to his alma mater as the freshman football coach and assistant basketball coach. After a protracted feud between his mentor Sermon and longtime donor Dave Clark, Warren was tabbed as Sermon's replacement in 1940. He was just 6-9 in his first season and did not qualify for the Southern Conference tournament. In his second season, Warren recruited Durham's Horace "Bones" McKinney and several strong in-state players and took his team to the Southern Conference champi- onship game, where it lost to Duke, 45-34. Six months after the 15-7 season ended, Warren volunteered for the U.S. Navy to establish the athletics portion of the University of Georgia's pre-flight train- ing program. After the war, he returned to Raleigh to enter the business world. Leroy Jay (1942-46) Of all the hard-luck athletes and coaches in school history, none had it harder than Jay. The native of Aurora, Ill., played both basketball and baseball for Sermon dur- ing the height of the Depression. His bas- ketball career was marred by unexplained injuries, a near-fatal case of the flu and eligibility issues because of an exhibition game he played during his freshman sea- son that cost him the entirety of his senior campaign. After graduation, he enrolled in gradu- ate school and made ends meet by of- ficiating high school and small college basketball games. In 1940, he was part of the pool of officials for Raleigh's Southern Conference tournament. That was the last season for Sermon, who was forced to re- tire and replaced by Warren. One of Warren's first moves was to hire Jay part-time as his freshman team coach, ending Jay's officiating career. He was then elevated to head coach when Warren joined the Navy. Since NC State was a U.S. Army training school, students on campus for military training were not allowed to participate in varsity sports, unlike the Navy train- ees at North Carolina and Duke, which fielded regular varsity teams. NC State relied mostly on freshmen too young for military service and students who were deemed unfit for the Army. Throughout the war, Jay was a part- time coach and a full-time employee of the N.C. Highway Commission. He posted four consecutive losing seasons (7-9, 5-13, 10-11 and 6-12) and lost four of the five games he coached in the Southern Conference Tournament. He never had a stable roster with anything other than cast-off players. When the war ended, Jay was replaced by future Hall of Fame coach Everett Case, who brought big-time basketball to the South. Jay went back to his job with the highway commission and completely dis- tanced himself from college athletics. Norman Sloan (1966-80) Sloan arrived in Raleigh after serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, one of Case's seven "Hoosier Hotshots" who changed the course of sports in the state of North Carolina. Case and his program first made college basketball relevant in the Old North State and then made it king of all athletics. Sloan, a guard from Indianapolis, was a big part of three consecutive Southern Conference titles, though he later clashed with Case and finished his career as a re- serve quarterback on the football team. Like his teammate and rival Vic Bubas, Sloan knew he wanted to be a coach and, in time, he became the most successful Wolfpack alum to lead his alma mater's Les Robinson played for Everett Case and was an assistant under Press Maravich in the 1960s. When Maravich left for LSU, Robinson moved on as well, but he returned as head coach in 1990 and went 20- 11 in his first season. PHOTO COURTESY NC STATE ATHLETICS