NASHVILLE --- Two-time Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame inductee and former Tennessee State men's basketball head coach John McLendon will posthumously be honored at this month's NCAA Convention with the 2021 Theodore Roosevelt Award.
 
The "Teddy" is the highest honor the NCAA can confer on an individual, as it is named after the former president, whose concern for the conduct of intercollegiate athletics led to the formation of the NCAA in 1906.
 
"Working with college students and college athletes really was the place closest to his heart," said McLendon's granddaughter Tracey Banks. "To hear that he is the recipient of this award means a great deal to our family."
 
McLendon led the Tigers in pivotal program years as he was a three-time winner of the NAIA Coach of the Year award, and won three consecutive NAIA championships, making him the first college basketball coach ever to have won three consecutive national titles.

McLendon was first inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as a "contributor", not as a coach. He was, however, selected in 2007 for the second entering class of the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame for his coaching achievements. In 2018, the 3x National Championship teams, of which he was head coach, was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
 
He was also inducted into the Tennessee State Athletics Hall of Fame in 1983 and the Cleveland State Athletics Hall of Fame in 2007, where his wife Joanna accepted the award on his behalf.
 
McLendon, who died in 1999 at the age of 84, was born in Hiawatha, Kansas, in 1915. He became enthralled with basketball in his childhood. After high school, he attended a junior college in Kansas City, Kansas, where he was a member of the basketball team.
 
He then transferred to Kansas, where he wasn't allowed to play on the basketball team due to segregation policies, but he was able to pick the brain of Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball and director of athletics at Kansas.
 
While learning from Naismith, McLendon developed his own coaching strategies and invented the up-tempo style of play that is prevalent today, with pressure defense leading to fast-break offense.
 
After coaching at the high school level, McLendon went on to coach college basketball at the North Carolina College for Negroes, now known as North Carolina Central (1941-52); Hampton (1953-54); Tennessee A&I, now known as Tennessee State (1955-59); Kentucky State (1964-66); and Cleveland State (1967-69). When he was hired at Cleveland State, he became the first Black head men's basketball coach at a predominantly white university.

He is also known for the Secret Game when his North Carolina Central team took on an all-white Duke medical school team filled with former college stars in Durham, North Carolina. In the Jim Crow South, it was against the law for Black and white athletes to compete against one another.

The Duke team played in its normal slow-paced style, while McLendon's team unleashed its high-pressure play. When the final buzzer sounded, McLendon's squad won "The Secret Game," 88-44.
 
"It is always lovely to know that people are thinking of him even now," Banks said. "This (the Theodore Roosevelt Award) is a collegiate athletics award. His days of working as a college basketball coach are really what you heard him talk about most. That's where you saw that real sense of accomplishment in him and the things he focused on."