Glen Tuckett
Glen Tuckett spent his college coaching career at Brigham Young University, where his teams won thirteen division baseball titles and three conference championships. They went to the College World Series in Omaha two times (qualifying for a third appearance but did not participate because the games were scheduled on Sunday). and posted two NCAA District 7 crowns. Tuckett was District 7 Coach of the Year three times and inducted into seven Halls of Fame. For seventeen years he was baseball coach and health professor in the College of Physical Education. From 1976 through 1993 he was director of athletics. In the "off-season from 1966-75, he was color analyst for KSL Radio with Paul James for BYU football and basketball games.
For eighteen months after his retirement, he served as interim director of athletics for the University of Alabama, where he successfully tidied up the Crimson Tide program from NCAA violations.
One of the highlights of his baseball career came in 1974 as coach of the United States team which won the World Amateur Baseball Tournament for only the second time in the tournament's 27-year history. In 1977 he was president of the American Baseball Coaches Association, 1979 ABCA Hall of Fame inductee, received its Lefty Gomez Award in 1990, Chairman of the ABCA Board of Directors ( 2004-2010) and was the ninth winningest baseball coach in the NCAA with a 445-256-4 record (.634) when he was named director of athletics at BYU.
He was the driving force in the expansion of BYU’s football stadium in 1982 which seated 30,000 and improved to 65,000 seats. Consequently, with the expanded stadium paired with the success of the program he helped foster, he was able to schedule games only dreamed of: home-and-home series with Notre Dame, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Texas, Miami, Washington and UCLA.[1] The BYU athletic program won 17 Western Athletic Conference overall supremacy trophies in his span as athletic director. During this time BYU also won the 1981 NCAA Men’s Golf Championship and was the 1984 National Champions with a perfect 13-0 record in football. He was the athletic director when Ty Detmer won the Heisman Trophy. He was awarded the Homer Rice Award (1994), and the NACDA/NIT Outstanding Athletic Director Award (1997) for being the nation's outstanding director of athletics.
His No. 20 BYU jersey was never reassigned.
Tuckett was born on December 11, 1927, in Salt Lake City, Utah. He grew up in Murray, Utah, where he graduated from high school. He served in the U.S. Army in Japan after he enlisted in 1946. He also played nine seasons in the minor pro baseball leagues. At West High School in Salt Lake City, he coached football, basketball, and baseball for six years before moving on to BYU.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah in 1953, his master’s degree from BYU in 1962, and his EdD degree from BYU in 1975.
He and his wife Josephine, had four daughters. He passed away on October 26, 2021, at the age of 93.