The Sports Guy

The Bobcats 84-80 victory over North Georgia College & State University last Saturday signaled not only their sixth win out of seven Peach Belt Conference games but also signaled Coach Terry Sellers 400th career win as a coach.

Sellers, now in his 13th year at GC&SU and 22nd year as a college head coach, is the career leader at GC&SU for men’s basketball with 202 wins. He grabbed his 200th win as a GC&SU coach earlier this season against UNC Pembroke.

Now where does this put Sellers in relation to other Peach Belt Conference and NCAA coaches? Sellers currently ranks second among Peach Belt Conference men’s coaches with 400 wins. Columbus State head coach Herbert Greene only outmatches him by 98 wins. Also Sellers, ironically, was a former college player for Greene at Auburn Montgomery.

As far as the NCAA is concerned, Sellers record is only 202 and 147, as his nine years at Alabama Southern Community College are not counted since it is a junior college. This leaves him out of the top 50 all-time in NCAA history as the 50th coach in the all-time win list for NCAA Division II has over 400 countable wins.

Now is it fair to not count those nine years of coaching and hard work he put in at Alabama Southern? I disagree with the NCAA on this one. I think any form of coaching should be counted. The nine years that Sellers spent in Alabama were years in which he had to do just as much work to win as any other coach at other universities. Coach Sellers won almost 200 games in nine years at Alabama Southern with less talent and pay than a division II coach gets. That is more than 20 wins a season. Can those seasons just merely be dismissed?

On the other hand, if the NCAA counted all wins by junior college coaches would Coach Sellers still have enough to still be in the top 50 of wins by NCAA coaches? There are probably hundreds of junior colleges all over the country with many coaches just as successful as Sellers.

Well, to leave off on a good note, I would like to send my congratulations to Coach Sellers for his achievement and I would like to add that I sympathize that his accomplishment will not be recognized on a national level.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Jan 20 2006. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry