Sam Barry - Legacy

Legacy

Barry's 18 seasons as a USC assistant football coach (1929–1940, 1945–1950) rank second only to the 26 years served by Marv Goux. His 19 years of overall participation in the program trail only Goux (31 years) and Cravath (23 years). His death came just as USC basketball was regaining its pre-war success, on the cusp of the West Coast's 1950s surge in the sport which included teams coached by John Wooden at UCLA, Phil Woolpert at San Francisco, and Pete Newell at California.

Sam Barry's players benefited greatly from his leadership and teaching ability. Four basketball players— Jerry Nemer, Lee Guttero, Ralph Vaughn and Bill Sharman— earned consensus first-team All-American honors; Barry is one of only 12 coaches in history to guide as many players to this honor. Perhaps his most visible legacy is the large number of his players who went on to successful coaching careers in their own right: Sharman, Alex Hannum, Tex Winter, Jack Gardner, Forrest Twogood and Bob Boyd in basketball, and Rod Dedeaux in baseball. In addition, Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson got his start in the sport while serving as a USC batboy in the 1940s. In all, 14 of Barry's baseball players went on to appear in the major leagues.

Barry was also nationally renowned as an innovator—he was the person most responsible for the elimination of the center jump after every free throw and basket in basketball, a move which resulted in a much faster-paced game; and he was also behind the move to create the center line and 10-second rule. He was the inventor of the triangle offense, which his pupil Tex Winter has refined to bring great recent successes to the NBA champion Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers teams. And Barry, along with Kansas coach Phog Allen, was one of the two primary national advocates of the delayed offense (commonly referred to as "stalling"), which was a staple of college basketball strategy at such powerhouses as Kansas and North Carolina, and throughout the country, before the introduction of the shot clock in 1985.

A respected figure in basketball circles since his early years—Barry was one of the two officials who worked the 1923 Illinois high school basketball championship game—he served on many significant NCAA committees in his later years, and was a primary force in establishing such national playoffs as the NCAA basketball tournament and the College World Series. His teams' popularity spread to the playing field and court as well. In addition to the leading crowd of the 1941 college football season, his 1939–40 basketball team drew a record crowd when visiting Madison Square Garden.

His accomplishments as a coach still stand today – his 40-game winning streak in basketball against UCLA, compiled from 1932 to 1942, and continued in 1946, stands as the longest winning streak by any coach against a single opponent in the history of college basketball. Only two other coaches have duplicated his achievement of leading teams to both the Final Four and the College World Series. In 1966, he became a member of the charter class of inductees to the American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame, and in 1978 he was elected to membership in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He was among the 2007 class of inductees to the USC Athletic Hall of Fame He was inducted into the Pac-12 Basketball Hall of Honor during the 2012 Pacific-12 Conference Men's Basketball Tournament, March 10, 2012.