Floyd "Jack" Bowling first came to LMU as a student in the fall of 1930. During his four years here he received letters in Basketball and Baseball. He earned All-Smoky Mountain Athletic Conference honors in both sports and was a standout in many games. He also assisted with the football team. For three of his four seasons at LMU he was teammates with future LMU coach and Trustee C. W. Bradley. One interesting irony of this time is the fact that he often ended up playing opposite East Tennessee State standout Dean Bailey, whom Bowling later would help bring to LMU as basketball and baseball coach.
Bowling returned to LMU in 1937 to take over the Railsplitter Basketball and Baseball squads and also as Athletic Director. During his five years at the helm he led the Railsplitters to their first conference victories in both sports (and their first back-to-back titles as well) and effectively put LMU Athletics on "the map". Both teams finished either first or second in the SMAC standings during his coaching tenure.
One basketball highlight of his coaching career was when the Railsplitters traveled to Duke University and beat the Blue Devils 43-39. It was the first non-conference loss by Duke in Indoor Stadium (later named Cameron Indoor stadium after Head Coach Eddie Cameron, who was a friend of Coach Bowling's), their other loss in the building up to that point being to arch-rival North Carolina. An interesting note about the game was that several LMU players had accidentally left their uniforms at home, so Duke Coach Cameron loaned them some of Duke's road uniforms to wear in the contest.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Bowling was called up and left LMU to serve in the Navy after the 1941-42 school year. He was on active duty 42 months and in the Ready Reserve for 21 years. He retired from military service as a Lieutenant Commander.
He later returned to LMU after the war as a Math Professor and later held several administrative posts in addition to his teaching duties. In 1957, he started a high school math contest that is currently still held annually by the Tennessee Math Teachers Association.
One of his protégés during this period was Herman Matthews, who later returned to LMU as a Math Professor and who originated the Scripps-Howard Computer Football Rankings, one of the first computer ranking systems for sports. The Scripps-Howard Poll was used by the NCAA as one of the BCS polling systems until the 2002 football season.
After the 1958-59 school season, Bowling left LMU to become the Dean of Students at Tennessee Wesleyan College in Athens, TN, and to teach Math there. He worked at TN Wesleyan until his retirement in the 1990's. TN Wesleyan named their new baseball field Jack Bowling Field in his honor. Their all-sports banquet is also named for him.
He also at various times was President of the Volunteer State Athletic Conference and its follower, the Tennessee Valley Athletic Conference. Bowling also was on several NAIA Athletic Committees and was widely known and respected around the college athletics world. He is a member of the NAIA National Hall-of-Fame in addition to halls of fame at LMU and Tennessee Wesleyan.
Bowling was also a founding member (and one of the first inductees) of the LMU Athletics Hall-of-Fame and was still an advisor to that committee until his death in 2009 at the age of 98.
