Basketball Coach Alex Cox Loved the Sport

Just about all of the successful coaches in Montgomery County pre-consolidation days played basketball when they were youngsters. That’s how they learned the basics of the game and what it took to win. But there was one notable exception, Alexander Cox, who coached at Darlington, Bowers, and Linden, only played basketball one time. As an 8th grade student at Garfield, he played a game against Youngs Chapel, his first, and only, interscholastic contest. He never participated in high school, possibly because of his size, as he told me, “I weighed 125 pounds and stood a massive 5’ 4” tall !” But although he did not play, he loved the game and attended all the contests he could wrangle a ticket for. After graduating from Darlington in 1925, Alex headed off to Wabash College to earn his degree in mathematics. Since Wabash had no physical education or coaching classes at that time, he enrolled in a football, basketball, and track coaching course at Indiana University in the summer of 1929, subsequently landing his first teaching and assistant coaching job at Francesville, where he stayed until 1935.

Darlington welcomed Alex back in 1935 as their head basketball coach for the next four years, during which time his teams enjoyed much success. Alex kept up with new phases of the game by attending coaching schools around the state. He was impressed by Everett Case of Frankfort and Glenn Curtis of Martinsville. Alex’s teams played “smart ball,” and he devised one of the best zone defenses that any team had ever faced. The 1936 team was edged out by Wingate in the final game of the County Tourney, but his 1939 team became the only Darlington team to ever beat Crawfordsville in Sectional Tourney play. The Athenians were ranked in the top ten in the state, but the Indians defeated them 25-21 in a hard fought contest. After taking a year off from coaching, Alex headed to Bowers, where he guided the Blackshirts for three years, helping them win that school’s only County Tourney championship in 1942.

Alex then coached at Richland Township for one year before deciding to return to Montgomery County as head mentor at Linden in the fall of 1944. At Linden, he compiled a 57-14 regular season record during the next four years, with the Bulldogs winning the County Tourney in 1948. In one game, the Linden boys were having a tough time during the first half. Nothing was going right, and the team was down by eight points in a game they were supposed to easily win. As the boys sat there in the locker room with their heads in their hands, Coach Cox sat down and said nothing. After several minutes, the Linden center, Albert Brown, who hardly ever said anything, blurted out, “Tell us a joke, Cox.” Everyone roared with laughter and they were still laughing when they went back on the floor for the second half. Alex said it changed the game dramatically, the boys relaxed, and won the game handily.

In the classroom, Alex was quite a character not to be outdone. He was a master storyteller and had a joke for every occasion. His students thought the world of him, and he always had a cherubic grin and interesting conversational wisdom. Upon his retirement from teaching and coaching, Alex purchased the Standard Oil service station in Darlington and also sold used cars from that location for many years. It was considered the “best hangout” for many men in the Darlington community, as “ol Coxie” had hundreds of jokes and stories in his repertoire until he passed away in the late 1970s. And those local men had great respect and admiration for Alex Cox…and they still called him “Coach.”

John “Butch” Dale is a retired teacher and County Sheriff. He has also been the librarian at Darlington the past 32 years, and is a well-known artist and author of local history.