Warren Wayne Whitlinger (April 4, 1914 – April 30, 2012) was an American professional

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular court, compete with the primary objective of shooting a basketball (approximately in diameter) through the defender's h ...

player. He played in the National Basketball League for the

Akron Firestone Non-Skids The Akron Firestone Non-Skids were an American professional basketball team based in Akron, Ohio. The team was one of the thirteen founding members of the National Basketball League (NBL), which formed in 1937. The team was named for the Firesto ...

during the 1937–38 season and averaged 4.5 points per game. As a

senior Senior (shortened as Sr.) means "the elder" in Latin and is often used as a suffix for the elder of two or more people in the same family with the same given name, usually a parent or grandparent. It may also refer to: * Senior (name), a surname ...

Ohio State The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best public ...

in 1935–36, Whitlinger led the

Big Ten Conference The Big Ten Conference (stylized B1G, formerly the Western Conference and the Big Nine Conference) is the oldest Division I collegiate List of NCAA conferences, athletic conference in the United States. Founded as the Intercollegiate Conferen ...

in scoring and was named to the All-Big Ten team. He also earned his

Master of Business Administration A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master's in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accou ...

(MBA) from Ohio State, graduating in 1940, and then accepted a job to work for

Kimberly-Clark Corporation Kimberly-Clark Corporation is an American multinational personal care corporation that produces mostly paper-based consumer products. The company manufactures sanitary paper products and surgical & medical instruments. Kimberly-Clark brand na ...

Family and tennis connections

In the early 1960s Whitlinger became involved with

tennis Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent ( singles) or between two teams of two players each ( doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball c ...

. It became his new passion and he got into coaching, where he ended up training three different national champions within his own family – his son

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and his twin granddaughters Tami and Teri. All three went on to have professional tennis careers, and John served as

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

's men's tennis head coach from 2005 to 2014. The Whitlingers were recognized as the Wisconsin and Midwest Tennis Family of the Year in 1986 and the

USTA The United States Tennis Association (USTA) is the national governing body for tennis in the United States. A not-for-profit organization with more than 700,000 members, it invests 100% of its proceeds to promote and develop the growth of tennis, ...

National Tennis Family of the Year in 1987. Warren was inducted into the Fox Valley Tennis Association Hall of Fame in 1999.

References

1914 births 2012 deaths Akron Firestone Non-Skids players American men's basketball players Basketball players from Ohio Forwards (basketball) Ohio State Buckeyes men's basketball players People from Barnesville, Ohio Sportspeople from Belmont County, Ohio Sportspeople from Neenah, Wisconsin Stanford Cardinal men's tennis coaches Tennis coaches from Ohio {{US-tennis-bio-stub