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Coaching double-double
Remember Ephraim "Red" Rocha If you need to win a tourney trivia bet. Rocha is the only individual to play and coach in both the NCAA and NBA playoffs. He played for Oregon State in the 1947 NCAA Tournament before appearing in 39 NBA playoff games (including '56 champion Syracuse Nationals with teammates Dolph Schayes and Red Kerr). Rocha coached the Detroit Pistons in the 1959 NBA playoffs and the University of Hawaii in the 1972 NCAA Tournament.
Bill Musselman was the latest coach to guide a school to the NCAA Tournament after coaching in the NBA. Musselman directed South Alabama to the 1997 playoffs before returning to the NBA as an assistant with the Portland Trail Blazers. Here is an alphabetical list of coaches in this category:
A total of 133 different men have taken teams to the College World Series. The only NCAA baseball championship coach to direct a basketball team to the Final Four was Sam Barry of Southern California. Barry, USC's all-time winningest basketball coach with 260 victories in 17 seasons from 1930 through 1941 and from 1946 through 1950, was in charge when the Trojans participated in the 1940 Final Four. In 1948, he was coach when USC's baseball squad won the second College World Series (at Kalamazoo, Mich.). The next year at Wichita, Kan., the last year before the CWS moved permanently to Omaha in 1950, Barry guided the Trojans' baseball team to a national third-place finish.
Jucker was Cincinnati's baseball coach for seven years before he was promoted to head basketball coach and directed the Bearcats to three consecutive championship game appearances from 1961 through 1963. His most famous baseball pupil was left-handed pitcher Sandy Koufax, a basketball scholarship athlete who played one year of freshman basketball under Jucker before signing with the Dodgers in 1954 and eventually conquering his control problems to become a baseball Hall of Famer.
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