Saturday, September 26, 2015

Former Southern basketball star, coach Tommy Green dies Friday at 59

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana -- Former Southern star basketball player and head coach Tommy Green, a 1991 inductee to the school’s Hall of Fame, died Friday. He was 59.

Current Southern men’s basketball coach and athletic director Roman Banks and Cheryl Michelet, communications director at BREC, confirmed Green’s death Friday. Green had served as BREC’s director of athletics for several years, ending in the fall of 2012.

A 1978 cum laude journalism graduate at Southern, Green was a longtime assistant men’s basketball at Southern, starting in 1987-88, and took over the program in September 1996 after Ben Jobe left to take over at Tuskegee.

Green went 74-64 in five seasons before being let go after the first year of a three-year contract, in March 2001.

Green was selected in the second round of the NBA draft by the New Orleans Jazz in 1978 after the point guard helped Southern to the Southwestern Athletic Conference title that season. He was co-captain that season, his fourth as a starter after a standout career at Baton Rouge’s McKinley High.

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