Clarence Edward “Big House” Gaines, Sr. (May 21, 1923 – April 18, 2005) was an American college men’s basketball coach with a 47-year coaching career at Winston-Salem State University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His 828 victories at Winston-Salem State University rank sixth on the career list among men’s college basketball coaches.
Gaines had a record of 828-447, coaching from 1946 to 1993. Only five men’s coaches in N.C.A.A. history — Dean Smith, Adolph Rupp, Bob Knight, Jim Phelan and Mike Krzyzewski— have more victories. Gaines’s team won the Division II national championship in 1967, led by guard Earl Monroe, who went on to star with the Knicks. Gaines was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1982.
Clarence Gaines, a native of Paducah, Ky., attended Morgan State on a football scholarship. He gained his nickname while at Morgan State where, according to lore, a fellow student saw the 6-foot-4, 250-pound Gaines and declared he was “as big as a house.”
After graduating from Morgan State, Gaines became football and basketball coach at Winston-Salem State, a historically black college. He coached football for four years before concentrating on the basketball program. Gaines won at least 20 games 18 times in his career and captured eight championships in the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association.
Gaines’s best season was in 1966-67, when he guided Winston-Salem State to a 31-1 record and the Division II title. The Rams were the first basketball program from a historically black college to win a national championship.
“There was a time in the 50’s and 60’s, where a lot of African-American athletes did not have scholarship opportunities to go to other universities,” Tim Grant, a former player and assistant coach under Gaines, said in a telephone interview to the New York Times. “Coach provided those opportunities and was able to recruit a lot of great African-American athletes.”
In a 1990 interview with The Charlotte Observer, Gaines bemoaned the loss of those talented players when segregation ended and many were able to get full scholarships to the Atlantic Coast Conference and other Division I programs. “The recruiting thing is a major problem,” he told The Observer. “The type of kids I’d like, I can’t get. It used to be, if I found a first-rate center, I could go out and get him. Even our graduates figure, as good as they were when they were here, now their kids are ready for the Big Ten.”
Gaines was named Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association coach of the year five times. In addition to coaching, Gaines was the longtime athletic director at Winston-Salem State. He served as a C.I.A.A. president from 1970 to 1974. Gaines was a member of the United States Olympic Committee from 1973 to 1976.
Gaines helped put Winston-Salem State on the national map.
“Winston-Salem State had a strong history of training elementary school teachers and principals,” Clarence F. Thompson Jr., chancellor at Winston-Salem State from 1985 to 1995, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “That was their long suit prior to the Gaines era. The Gaines era brought about an exposure of the institution across the country in athletics by winning various championships at the Division II level. Of course, he put the name out in other states across the country where the school was not so well known.”
Thompson said that Gaines also helped raise millions of dollars in corporate donations to the university. The home arena for the Rams is named the C.E. Gaines Center, and the university’s Hall of Fame is named after Gaines as well.