As head tennis coach at Bay Shore High, Allan Van Nostrand’s teams have consistently achieved local, regional and national acclaim. His players have captured 10 county championships, 16 league titles and more than 400 career victories, including a streak of 173 consecutive wins during a nine-year span which stood as a national record.
“My experience as an undergraduate at Cortland greatly influenced my career as both teacher and coach,” noted Van Nostrand, both a tennis professional and a Bay Shore social studies teacher for three decades. “Ralph Brown’s approach of weaving history around the personalities of great men became the cornerstone for my interest in and love of history. Gus Timmel’s compassion and easy going coaching style helped set the tone for the kind of coaching personality I developed later.”
Van Nostrand, a Brightwaters, N.Y., native, competed in basketball at Cortland but, along with his brother, King, excelled in tennis. He won the prestigious Rider College Invitational singles title for Cortland – the equivalent of the NCAA small college championships in the early 1950’s. Listed in Who’s Who in American Colleges, Van Nostrand earned a bachelor’s degree in education in January, 1954.
The next two years were spent in the U.S. Army Air Force in the Far East, where Van Nostrand won the All-Service Doubles Championship in Guam and the Far Eastern Doubles Championship in Japan in 1954. He returned to Bay Shore High in 1955. Van Nostrand taught and coached there until his retirement in 1986. During his 26 years as head tennis coach, Van Nostrand was named New York State Coach of the Year, Section XI Coach of the Year and the National High School Athletic Coaches Region I Coach of the Year. He was president of the Suffolk County Coaches Association and chaired both league and sectional tennis organizations.
The Van Nostrand brothers have remained active tennis professionals through the years. In the early 1970’s, the tandem ranked among the top seven nationally in the 35-year-old bracket of men’s doubles competition. As recently as 1986, Van Nostrand captured the 55-year-old men’s singles title in Bermuda. In 1983 and 1984, Van Nostrand co-chaired the Pro-Am Charity Tennis Tournament for the South Side and Good Samaritan Hospitals. When he retired from Bay Shore High in 1986, Van Nostrand established an annual $300 fund for each incoming freshman class, the money to be used and monitored in the stock market by the class during the four high school years. The class then receives the proceeds its senior year.
Van Nostrand and his wife, Mary Constance Stark ’51, have four children: Susan, Lynn, Allan and Amy.
UPDATE: Van Nostrand passed away on August 13, 2012 at age 81.
