Owens attended college at Oklahoma University, where he was a three-year letterman under head coach John MacLeod. He graduated with a BA degree in 1951. In 1956, he was hired to coach both baseball and basketball at Cameron Junior College, where he remained until 1960. His baseball team won the National JC Championship in 1958. The basketball team had a 93-24 record during his four years and appeared in three NJCAA Tournaments. Owens' overall Kansas record was 348–182, and his Big Eight Conference record was 170–96. In Owens' tenure at KU, he won six Big Eight Conference titles and advanced to the NCAA tournament seven times. His 1971 and 1974 teams made it to the Final Four, and in 1968 the Jayhawks lost to Dayton in the finals of the National Invitation Tournament. Owens was named Big Eight Conference Coach of the Year five times and was Named National Coach of the Year in 1978 by Basketball Weekly. He coached five All-Americans: Jo Jo White, Darnell Valentine, Dave Robisch, Bud Stallworth and Walt Wesley. He was fired following the 1982–83 season after the Jayhawks posted back-to-back losing seasons. He is the only coach in the programs history to be fired. Kansas has not suffered a losing season since, and has only missed the NCAA tournament once since then, in 1988–89 when the program was on probation for recruiting violations committed by Owens' successor, Larry Brown. A three-year letterman at the University of Oklahoma, Owens honed his coaching skills as head coach at Cameron State Junior College in Lawton, Oklahoma. In four seasons his teams never won fewer than 20 games and three times advanced to the NJCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship semifinals. At Cameron, he amassed a 93–24 record and boasted four junior college All-Americans. Owens then accepted an assistant's position under Dick Harp in 1960, and was promoted to head coach when Harp resigned following the 1963–64 season.
Other coaching activities
Owens had a brief stint of coaching at Oral Roberts University, and then in Israel with Maccabi Tel Aviv during the 1989–90 season, before being fired in February 1990. He then went on to be the development director and basketball coach at Metro Christian Academy in Tulsa, Oklahoma for five years where his teams won the district championship five times, and went to the state tournament three times. Subsequently, he moved on to be athletic director at St. Leo University in Florida for four years. Owens was inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame on August 3, 2009. He was inducted into the Kansas Hall of Fame in the same year.
Retirement
After leaving St. Leo, a friend invited him to return to Tulsa and work as an investment adviser for First Capital Management, where he spent the next ten years. After retiring from this position, he decided to continue living in Tulsa in retirement.
