Jack Jensen, who coached Guilford College to four of its five national championships, died late Sunday night, apparently of a heart attack. He was 71.
Jensen, a 1961 graduate of Wake Forest, coached at Guilford for 45 years and led the Quakers to two NAIA championships (basketball in 1973, golf in 1989) and two NCAA Division III championships (golf in 2002 and 2005).
Tom Palombo, the athletics director and current basketball coach at Guilford, said: "As great a coach as Jack was, he was an even greater person. It is an honor to have been at Guilford with him and to talk with him every day. He knew a lot about basketball and a lot about people.... He will be greatly missed."
Palombo, who has coached the Quakers to the last two Division III Final Fours, said he could always lean on Jensen. "He was an icon here, what more can you say," Palombo said. "He touched more lives than you can count."
Jensen was in his 33rd season as the golf coach, and the Quakers finished sixth in his final tournament, at Camp Lejeune last weekend.
Jensen came to Wake Forest in the late 1950s and walked on in basketball, said former teammate Billy Packer.
"Jack was a gym rat," Packer said yesterday by telephone from his home in Charlotte. "He was the guy that was always playing pickup basketball with us and always around the gym, so Bones McKinney (the coach at the time) one day just said, ‘Since you are always at the gym why don't you just be on the team?'"
Jensen didn't play much, Packer said, but was McKinney's favorite walk-on of all time.
"Jack was just a great person who was a great teammate as well," Packer said.
Jensen started his career at Guilford in 1965 as an assistant basketball coach under Jerry Steele, another former Wake Forest teammate, and as the head coach in track and field. He took over as the basketball coach in 1970, when Steele left for the Carolina Cougars of the American Basketball Association, and held the position 29 years, compiling a 386-392 record.
Jensen is the most decorated coach in Guilford history and one of only two coaches to lead teams to NAIA titles in two sports. He is a member of the NAIA, North Carolina, Guilford County, Guilford College, Wake Forest and Golf Coaches Association of America halls of fame.
Dave Odom, a 1965 Guilford graduate and former basketball coach at Wake Forest, says the long career at Guilford tells people all they need to know about Jensen.
"You talk about 45 years at Guilford, that shows you right there how loyal he was and what a great thing it was to have Jack there for all those years," Odom said. "You talk about a person who had all the qualities you could ask for in a human being, it was Jack Jensen."
Odom said that during his time at Wake Forest, Jensen always supported him after tough losses or during losing streaks. "He would call and let me know that he was behind what we were doing, and I always appreciated him as a friend, because he didn't have to do that, but he did," Odom said.
Bryson McKinney of Winston-Salem, who graduated from Guilford in 2002, played on Jensen's final Quakers basketball team in 1998-99. He said that when people think about Guilford, Jack Jensen immediately comes to mind.
"He was Guilford athletics," McKinney said. "He was definitely a legendary figure."
Jensen is survived by his wife of 38 years, Marsha Jensen, a 1974 Guilford graduate. The couple has two adult children, Laura Jensen Thornburg, a 1997 Guilford graduate, and Dennis Jensen, a 2000 Guilford graduate, and one grandson, Jack Holton Thornburg.
jdell@wsjournal.com
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