Don Owen: Exactly 24 years ago, a walk with Ken Shields was a journey into NKU history
(This column was originally published on March 21, 2020) National television beckoned for the first time in school history. An NCAA championship would be at stake in less than 48 hours. It was March 21, 1996, and Northern Kentucky had just knocked off powerful Virginia Union in the NCAA Division II Final Four. NKU head coach Ken Shields was wrapping up a surreal evening at the Commonwealth Convention Center in Louisville with a final one-on-one interview with a newspaper reporter. The makeshift basketball site had just provided one of the classic games in Division II history, as LaRon Moore hit a 12-foot turnaround jumper in the closing seconds to give NKU a 68-66 win over Virginia Union. The NKU players — Moore, Andre McClendon and Paul Cluxton — had already done their mandatory interviews at the NCAA postgame press conference. The media, though, wanted plenty of one-on-one interviews with Shields. So did some officials from CBS, which would be televising NKU’s national championship g...