A Legacy of Excellence

If the legacy of a champion is made through hard work and dedication than golf coach Jim Owen has all but cemented his.

Already a member of the Oglethorpe sports Hall of Fame, the coach, in his 31^st year at the university snagged his eleventh coach of the year award in the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference. That’s 11 victories in the award’s 15 year existence.

For a program that has only been around since 1993, Owen has made Oglethorpe a D-III powerhouse in the golfing world. For a school that has, according to him, one of the smallest D-III enrollments, one of the smallest campuses, a small faculty and one of the smallest budgets in the entire country, it might have seemed like an improbable road in securing a place on the top. Owen has one secret he thinks has helped his school find success.

“Recruiting,” he said simply. “Recruiting every day. Recruiting is like shaving, if you miss a day, you look like a bum.”

And that’s how Owen found himself making recruiting calls even on Father’s Day. One part of his legacy: dedication to the school.

“We are underfunded and mostly underpaid,” he joked. “But we found a unique group of people that believe in hard work and elbow grease and we are getting the job done.”

The other part of the equation is hard work. Owen is the director of both men’s and women’s golf, but since the hiring of head coach Cindy Vaios on the women’s end, he said he spends 100 percent of his time working with men’s golf and about 20 percent with women’s now.

A graduate of Barry College in Rome, Ga., Owen said the school didn’t even have a golf program while he attended, so he played basketball instead. He was hired by Oglethorpe in the 90s as a graduate assistant for the basketball program. In 1993, the athletic director came to him and asked him to take on the golf program, as well as continue to be the assistant basketball coach, which he gladly did for the next ten years.

While the success of the program was not immediate, it didn’t take long for Owen to leave his mark.

“I only have one speed for recruiting: full,” he said. “So I cast a big net hoping to catch a fish or two. After about three years, I started to catch some really big fish.”

By 1998 the program had won its first conference championship, just five years after its inception. Since then the program has won eight SCAC championships, including a span of four in a row from 2000-2003. They’ve also finished in the top 10 every year since 2000.

Owen led them to their first and only school national championship in May 2009. It was a victory felt by the entire athletic department.

“We felt it at Oglethorpe across the board,” he recalled. “We are a small community. I think the other coaches enjoyed it as much as I did. They were all truly happy for us that we were able to do the impossible. We persevered and we overcame. It was like, ‘If golf can do it, we can do it.’”

And 31 years after joining this small community, he continues to coach with the hard work and dedication that he started with, which is probably a large reason he’s won more SCAC Coach of the Year awards than anyone else in the conference.

“This beats the heck out of work,” he said. “I have yet to go to work in 31 years. I love coaching. Period. I could coach anything and would coach anything. But the challenge of convincing 10 individuals to come together and play as a team; golfers don’t grow up with that mentality. So to bring them all together… You’ve got something special in golf.”

It seems Oglethorpe has something special in Owen, as well.