Indiana University of Pennsylvania Athletics

Baseball coach ... head football coach, after a long tenure as the team's defensive coordinator ... an administrator in admissions and student life while a member of the faculty from 1956 until 1991. In tthese roles, Owen Dougherty made a contribution to IUP that has few parallels.  

In baseball, for example, after serving as assistant from '56 through 1963, he became head coach until 1969, then again for the 1990 season. His best seasons, among many successful ones that added up to a record of  133-58, were his first and his last.

In 1964, IUP won Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference and NAIA District  18 championships. The PSAC title was won again in 1990, when the Indians posted a 35- I 0 record, culmunated by their advancing to the NCAA Division II regional tournament.

The IUP Council  of Trustees  in 1991 designated the campus baseball complex, which Owen himself developed 25 years prior, as Owen J. Dougherty Field. It was further stipulated that a proposed new facility, when built, will also be named for him.

Football also offered Dougherty opportunities to achieve, first  as assistant coach (Frank Cignetti  was a player in his first four years) and defensive coordinator through 1968, when IUP nearly upset heavily favored Delaware at the Boardwalk Bowl in Atlantic City's Convention Hall.

Eleven years later, he became head football coach and in three seasons posted a 17-13 record. His first campaign (1979) resulted in a 7-3 mark and brought Owen an NAJA District 18 Coach of the Year award to match one he had earned  in baseball in 1964.

Besides coaching, Dougherty taught health and physical education courses from '56 until  '69, then served as Director of Housing and Food Service (1969-79), as Assistant Dean of Admissions (1979-89 ) and as a member  of the athletic department staff for fund raising and game management.

A 1951 graduate of Penn State, where he captained football and baseball teams, and a U.S. Air Force veteran, Owen pitched minor league baseball   for Scranton, near hometown Dunmore, where he had earned 16 high school athletic letters. He is a Northeastern Pennsylvania Hall of Fame inductee.

The Indiana area community remembers Owen and Virginia (also passed away) as active contributors to such concerns as the American Cancer Society and the campus Newman Center.

Today, the Dougherty family continues to enrich the university and Indiana area in the persons of attorney and IUP trustee Robert, Indiana High soccer coach David and IUP football and basketball student coach Patrick, along with sons Edwin and Owen and daughters Virginia and Ellen.