19 November 2008

The United States Sports Academy Directors’ Cup is usually presented to the athletic program that leads its class in overall athletic performance, based on national placing. However, no official distinction has been given for the athletic program that puts together the most Academy honorees at one time.

If such a title existed, the honor would have been bestowed upon Azusa Pacific University. The small Christian university near Los Angeles, a member of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), led all NAIA and even NCAA institutions on the night of Saturday, 15 November.

Azusa hosted a banquet in which Dr. Gary Cunningham, an Academy Trustee and recipient of its 2006 Carl Maddox Sports Management award, presented the Director’s Cup for NAIA schools to APU. He also presented Azusa Athletic Director Bill Odell with an Academy Distinguished Service Award and presented 2008 Olympic Gold Medal decathlete and Azusa graduate Bryan Clay with the Academy’s Jim Thorpe All-Around Award.

The Academy trifecta presentation was part of a banquet held to honor Clay, who won the Gold Medal in the decathlon at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China, finishing with 8,791 points, 240 ahead of silver medalist Andrei Krauchanka of Belarus. That margin of victory was the largest since the 1972 games. Clay also won the gold in the Heptathlon at the World Indoor Track and Field Championships in Valencia, Spain.

He won the Academy’s Jim Thorpe All-Around Award, which is named after the legendary Native American athlete who won the Gold medal in the Pentathlon and Decathlon before an illustrious professional football career. Thorpe was recognized by the Associated Press as the Greatest Football Player and Greatest All-Around Athlete of the first half of the 20th century.

The Distinguished Service Award was presented to Bill Odell, one of college basketball's most successful coaches, who resigned in April of 2007 as coach of Azusa Pacific to dedicate himself full time to his other Azusa position of athletic director. His coaching career has spanned 39 years in which his teams have won 856 games total with 454 of those wins at Azusa.

Odell has served Azusa Pacific jointly as the head men’s basketball coach and as athletic director since 1997, leading a program that has won four straight Directors’ Cup Titles in the NAIA division.

Developed as a joint effort between USA Today and the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) and sponsored by the Academy, the Directors’ Cup program is the only all-sports competition that recognizes an institution from each of the four main collegiate divisions for having the best overall men’s and women’s athletic program.

Azusa won the award for the fourth straight year after placing in 14 postseason championships and earning points in six men's and six women's sports, the maximum allowed in the NAIA division. The Cougars earned three individual championships, taking the titles in men's soccer and men's indoor and outdoor track and field. Azusa Pacific also placed second in women's indoor track and field and women's soccer, third in men's tennis, fourth in women's outdoor track and field, fifth in men's basketball and women's tennis, sixth in women's cross country, seventh in baseball and 58th in women's volleyball.

Dr. Cunningham, winner of the Academy’s Carl Maddox Sports Management Award in 2006, served for 13 years as director of athletics at the University of California Santa Barbara, where he received numerous national honors. In 2003, NACDA presented Cunningham the James J. Corbett Award for devotion to collegiate athletics. He was recognized as NACDA’s Division I-AA/I-AAA Athletic Director of the Year before receiving the NACDA/NIT Athletic Director Award in 2000. Cunningham was the first recipient of the NCAA Division I-AAA Lifetime Achievement Award.

Cunningham was a collegiate director of athletics for 28 years after serving as head basketball coach at UCLA. In his two seasons as head coach, the Bruins were 50-8, won two Pacific 10 championships, and played in the 1979 West Regional Finals of the NCAA Tournament. He was named PAC 10 Coach of the Year during both seasons. He served as an assistant under legendary head coach John Wooden from 1965-75 when the Bruins won eight national championships. During that time, he coached the freshman team to a 101-15 record over six seasons. As a player under Wooden, Cunningham was a three-year starter and a first-team All-Conference forward in 1961.