From Ralph Sampson to Sister Jean, from Charlottesville to Chicago, Doug Elgin has spent the better part of four decades around college basketball celebrities. Those bonds and memories will sustain him when he retires this summer after 33 years as the Missouri Valley Conference’s commissioner.
Elgin, 70, is Division I’s longest-tenured active commissioner, but like many of us, he job-hopped early in his career. His first break came in the summer of 1980, when then-Virginia athletics director Gene Corrigan hired him as the Cavaliers’ sports information director.
UVA had never won an NCAA tournament game, but Terry Holland’s program was fresh off an NIT championship and returned the nation’s most intriguing player in Sampson, a 7-foot-4 sophomore. After previous SID gigs at Frostburg (Md.) State, where he was also the school’s offensive backfield coach, Miami Dade Community College and Lafayette College, Elgin had no clue what awaited him.
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Oh, Elgin knew plenty about Sampson. He was courtside at University Hall the previous March as Sampson’s 19 points, 13 rebounds and nine blocked shots led Virginia over Lafayette in the first round of the NIT.
What Elgin didn’t quite grasp was the media’s appetite for all things Sampson. He soon learned.
Elgin arrived at UVA just as a Sports Illustrated crew descended on Charlottesville for a preseason photo session that yielded a cover montage of Sampson, Maryland’s Albert King and DePaul’s Mark Aguirre. The three were dressed in colonial fife-and-drum garb under the headline “That Old School Spirit.”
“It wasn’t like we were trying to get him more attention,” Elgin said of Sampson. “It was: How do we manage it?”
Imagine the Sampson Era in today’s social media world. He almost certainly wouldn’t have played four seasons at UVA, and magazine covers would have been the least of Elgin’s headaches.
Sampson “would have been the Zion Williamson of his day,” Elgin said.
In the first of his three national player-of-the-year seasons, Sampson led Virginia to the 1981 Final Four in Philadelphia, where they lost in the semifinals to ACC rival North Carolina and were preparing for Monday’s consolation game against LSU when the news broke.
President Reagan had been shot in Washington, D.C.
Huddled at the team hotel, the Cavaliers awaited updates on Reagan’s condition and whether that night’s games would go on. Assured that Reagan’s wounds were not grave, the NCAA opted to play — Virginia beat LSU in the last Final Four consolation ever staged, and Indiana defeated UNC for the national championship.
Elgin worked a second basketball season at UVA be- fore heading to the Sun Belt Conference in 1983 as an assistant commissioner under Vic Bubas. His SID days were over, but he retained an affection for the craft.
“I can remember my early years as an SID, carrying an IBM Selectric typewriter [on the road],” Elgin said. “That was the latest technology because you could erase a mistake. The skill set today: These people are videographers, social media experts. It is a much more difficult and pressurized environment for sports information people.”
The Sun Belt of the early-to-mid 1980s was a quality basketball league headlined by VCU, Old Dominion and Alabama-Birmingham. Indeed, the Rams’ 1985 Sun Belt tournament championship at Hampton Coliseum — they defeated ODU in a raucous final — elevated them to No. 11 in The Associated Press poll.
Interacting with strong-willed coaches such as VCU’s J.D. Barnett, ODU’s Paul Webb and UAB’s Gene Bartow prepared Elgin for his destination job: Missouri Valley commissioner.
With a heritage that includes Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird and Cincinnati’s 1961 and ’62 national titles, the St. Louis-based Missouri Valley has long been about hoops. Elgin took over in 1988 and, despite several rounds of realignment, helped the conference sustain that basketball prominence.
“As its leader, he focused on the alignment of academics and sports and was innovative and aggressive in his approach to elevate the Missouri Valley, particularly in basketball,” said former UVA athletics director Craig Littlepage, an assistant coach on the Cavaliers’ 1981 Final Four team. “He always seemed to be a step ahead of things in the Valley’s response to the changing conference landscape by reinventing the league’s membership.”
Like Corrigan, Elgin took the job, but not himself, seriously. Through calm and crisis, he never lost his sense of humor.
He never severed his Virginia ties, either. Sampson, Littlepage and former VCU SID Tom Baker remain in Elgin’s orbit, and Corrigan was a confidant until his death last year.
Final Four appearances by Wichita State in 2013 — the Shockers followed up with an undefeated regular season the following year — and Loyola of Chicago in 2018 highlighted Elgin’s Missouri Valley tenure, but the league’s NCAA tournament success went far deeper. Valley programs Tulsa, Creighton, Southern Illinois, Bradley, Missouri State and Northern Iowa also advanced to Sweet 16s, and the conference’s postseason conquests included Kansas, Indiana, UCLA, Louisville, Texas, Florida and Wisconsin.
“You name the top-20 brands, and we’ve beaten most of them in the [NCAA] tournament,” said Elgin, who served on the Division I men’s basketball committee from 1999 to 2002.
Among the mid-majors to have competed in every NCAA tournament from 2010 to 2021, only the West Coast Conference (28-19) — Gonzaga is responsible for 23 of those victories — and Missouri Valley (22-16) have winning records.
Elgin credits league schools for hiring capable coaches such as Dana Altman at Creighton, Gregg Marshall at Wichita State, Ben Jacobson at Northern Iowa and Greg McDermott at Creighton and Northern Iowa. And it was coaching that drew Elgin and the Valley to Loyola when Creighton exited the conference for the Big East in 2013.
Elgin has known Ramblers coach Porter Moser since Moser played for Creighton in the late ’80s, and he thought Moser, the Chicago market and the program’s tradition would be assets to the league. Little could he have imagined that Moser would conjure memories of Loyola’s 1963 national title.
The Ramblers reached not only the Final Four three years ago, but also the Sweet 16 this season, upsetting Illinois, the Midwest Region’s top seed, in the second round. There for it all was Sister Jean, the team’s 101-year-old chaplain.
Elgin marvels at her warmth, recall and basketball knowledge. Before Loyola’s 2018 run turned her into a national icon, Elgin would often sit with her at games. Now he has to stand in line with everyone else for an audience, though she always knows his name.
The only events Elgin attended during this pandemic season were the Valley’s men’s and women’s basketball tournaments — Missouri State’s women also reached the NCAA Sweet 16 — but COVID-19 stress aside, he’s grateful for the entirety of his career and the opportunity to spend more time with his wife, Melanie, and their six daughters and eight grandchildren.
“My professional life has been spent with college sports,” Elgin said. “What could be better than that?”