After the death of basketball coach Ken Trickey in 2012, the Tulsa World called him “one of the most influential and colorful characters in this state’s basketball history”.

He played basketball at Middle Tennessee State College, where he was an Ohio Valley All-Conference player for three years. He is still one of the top ten scorers for Middle Tennessee and was elected to the university’s Sports Hall of Fame. He returned to Middle Tennessee and became the head basketball coach in 1964. Ken recruited the first African American athletes to play basketball at Middle Tennessee during the height of the Civil rights movement in the south.

In 1969, Ken was hired by Oral Roberts to coach the ORU Basketball team. He took ORU to the NCAA Final Eight as an independent in 1974. His ORU teams during that time also led the nation in scoring and made two NIT appearances in New York City. Upon leaving ORU in 1974, Ken coached at Colorado State University, Iowa State University, Claremore Junior College, Oklahoma City University, and Oklahoma Junior College before returning to ORU where he finished his coaching career in 1993.

He was especially remembered for ORU’s high-scoring “run and gun” teams of the early 1970s, which helped the young, small school attain national attention and competitive success, including a spot in the Elite Eight in the 1974 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament.

During the early 2000s, Ken became a supervisor/evaluator of officials for the Big 12 Conference. In 2010 he was inducted into the Oral Roberts University Sports Hall of Fame.

Ken was 79 when he died on December 4, 2012.

Ken Trickey: “I never understood why everybody wanted to be like everybody else.”