The next time you’re asked to define “irony,” just say: “Josh and Latonia Allen.”

Irony No. 1: Josh, coach of the blue-and-gold-clad women’s basketball team at Alderson-Broaddus, likes arch-rival Davis and Elkins’ red and white so much that he has a lot of it in his wardrobe.

Irony No. 2: Latonia, the women’s volleyball coach at Davis and Elkins, doesn’t care for red.

Irony No. 3: They’re married.

If that isn’t ironic enough, follow this:

Both were standout student-athletes at Alderson-Broaddus – Josh as part of a three-time West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championship basketball team and Latonia as the league’s volleyball player of the year in 2004. The two enjoyed a courtship, got married and then went to California (Pennsylvania) for their master’s degrees in athletic training.

Near the end of their tenure there, Josh snagged the vacant women’s basketball coaching position at A-B and brought Latonia back to Philippi, where she found physical therapy work about an hour away. But a series of circumstances in the middle of volleyball season left Davis and Elkins without a coach, and administrators at the school just down the road from A-B knew Latonia was back in the area.

On a hunch, they asked her to help get them through the rest of the year, and Latonia – because she wanted so badly to be a coach – for two months drove 45 minutes to Salem for work, another 90 minutes from there to Elkins for practice or games and then the half hour back to Philippi. Her dedication and skill paid off when D&E offered her the full-time job in January 2007.

Make sense? Well, it better, because the color thing still doesn’t.

“I often end up wearing the wrong clothes,” Josh says. “When we hosted D&E in volleyball, for example, I didn’t even think about it and came in wearing black shorts and a red T-shirt instead of our gold and blue. So I had a rough day from the other coaches around here.”

And just recently, Latonia was at a D&E baseball game against A-B, along with Josh and his basketball team. “I got cold and didn’t have anything to wear, so Josh gave me his A-B sweatshirt. Things like that happen to us all the time.”

Maybe love is color blind, though.

“We’re each other’s biggest fans,” Josh says. “At our games, she’s probably the loudest one there. The same goes for me and her volleyball games. Each school’s coaching staff knows us very well. When our volleyball team plays at D&E, I cheer for both, and our people understand that.”

“He’s become close to my volleyball players, so he cheers for them, and I’m the same with his kids,” Latonia says. “When A-B played D&E in basketball, I was 100 percent cheering for A-B. I mean, those kids spend time at our house and we’ve become very close to them. I don’t know if our basketball coach is a big fan of it, but our little joke is that Josh and I go home with each other, so we support each other.”

And just to complete the irony circle, A-B AD J.D. Long said it’s a wonder the two are together at all. “They were both so shy, it took them a year to even get to know each other,” he says. “If you looked at 100 kids, you wouldn’t find two like this – both of these kids are top-on-top of polite. For them to be together is almost amazing.”