Campus Features and Ornaments

Tier I: Harding Road Level
Tier II: Upper Campus, Front
Tier III: Courtyard at rear of Massey Commons
Tier IV: Front Campus Green
Tier V: John E. Sloan Quadrangle
Centennial Gate, Howard Allen, 1908-1977
Heritage of MBA Football, 1899-1998
Tommy Owen, 1924-1993

Tommy Owen, 1924 - 1993
Thomas Otto (Tommy) Owen was a fourteen-year-old sophomore weighing 108 pounds when he began playing high school football in Pineville, Kentucky. Lacking both size and speed, but inspired by his coach, he relied on hard work and determination in his quest to become a better player. By his senior year he weighed only 138 pounds, but he earned a starting position at blocking back and defensive halfback.

His athletic career apparently at an end, Tommy Owen attended college for a year before he left to fight in World War II. He served with distinction as a navigator in a bomber squadron, and while in formation in a B-24 over Europe, he suddenly realized that he wanted to be a high school coach and history teacher.

Tommy Owen returned from the war to earn a degree at Vanderbilt University where he had an unheralded football career under the legendary coach Red Sanders. In 1949 he became the head football coach in Amory, Mississippi, and after a highly successful tenure there, Coach Owen, at the age of twenty-nine, came to Montgomery Bell Academy.

Tommy Owen coached football at MBA for all but six seasons from 1953 until 1992, and he compiled a record of 251-98-11. He was, from the first, a dedicated teacher who believed that academics were of primary importance, but that athletics were a fundamental part of education.

Coach Owen loved the game of football and believed that it demanded everything, both physically and mentally, that a young man had to give. His coaching was a continuing lesson about discipline, teamwork, and commitment to excellence. Year after year his teams displayed the highest levels of preparatory attention to detail, poise, and sportsmanship, and decade after decade his players left MBA with a deeper understanding of such qualities as dignity, responsibility, sacrifice, integrity, and trust.