Marshall University Athletics
Marshall Athletics Hall of Fame
- Induction:
- 1985
- Class:
- 1948
When Marshall won the 1947 NAIB National Basketball Championship, the team captain and top scorer was Andy Tonkovich. A 6-foot-1 guard from Union High School in Benwood, W.Va., Tonkovich made an immediate impact at Marshall for Coach Cam Henderson, helping the team to a 17-9 record as a freshman in the 1944-45 season and then a 25-10 mark the following year. By the time he was a junior, Henderson made Tonkovich the team captain and Marshall put together the best season in school history.
The 1946-47 Thundering Herd won its first 17 games before dropping a contest to the University of Cincinnati, ending the regular season with a 27-5 record and a berth in the NAIB (now NAIA) National Tournament in Kansas City, Mo. There, in the Municipal Auditorium, Marshall ran off a string of five wins in six days to claim the national crown. Tonkovich was chosen as a member of the All-Tournament Team and was also named a first-team NAIB All-American. As a senior, Tonkovich helped Marshall to another NAIB Tournament bid and received second team All-American honors from the NAIB in a year that included a championship game win over Syracuse in the Los Angeles Invitational Tournament. Tonkovich scored 1,578 points in his Marshall career, at the time the most in school history.
After finishing at Marshall, Tonkovich was chosen by the Providence Steamrollers as the No. 1 overall selection in the 1948 NBA Draft, the second draft in league history. After one season with Providence, Tonkovich chose to leave the NBA to play for and coach the Wheeling Blues in the All-American Basketball League, and then became a high school coach and physical education teacher in West Virginia and eventually at Chaminade-Madonna High School in Hollywood, Fla., where he served as athletic director and coached basketball, baseball, football and tennis teams for 21 years. He was inducted into the NAIA Hall of Fame in 1973, enshrined in the Chaminade-Madonna High School Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Ohio Valley Athletic Conference (high school) Hall of Fame in 2014. Tonkovich was inducted into the Marshall Athletic Hall of Fame in 1985.
