Today's Tidbit... Football's First Coaching Schools and Clinics
Today's Tidbit... Football's First Coaching Schools and Clinics
I recently came across a claim that the first football coaching clinic came in 1924 under the direction of Ira "Irl" Tubbs, then the football and basketball coach at Wisconsin's Superior Normal School. Tubbs played football at William Jewell before coaching at Superior High School, where his top player was Ernie Nevers. Tubbs' 1920 team was widely considered the best team in the state. Their only competition for the mythical state title came from East Green Bay High, coached by a young Curly Lambeau, who was also in his first year as the Packers' player coach that year.
Tubbs took over at the Normal School in 1923, later coaching at Miami (FL) and Iowa, but is best known for developing a patented valve and needle system for inflating balls, including footballs. (More on that in a few days.)
Tubbs and Superior Normal hosted a summer coaching clinic in 1924 featuring Knute Rockne and Dr. Walter E. Meanwell, Wisconsin's basketball coach who won nine Big Ten championships in his tenure. Touted by some as the first coaching clinic, it was not and wasn't even Rockne's first clinic since "coaches' schools" had been around for at least a decade.
Among football's great debates in the 1800s was the role of coaches and whether they should be seasonal hires or faculty members. Most were seasonal hires, with colleges commonly hiring recently graduated players to coach their teams. As the years passed, some colleges shifted to year-round coaches, such as when Illinois hired Bob Zuppke as their first full-time coach in 1913.
Likewise, small colleges and high schools used a mix of volunteer and paid coaches who had played for the school or happened to live nearby. Many high school teachers had little schooling beyond their prep days at the time, but teachers' roles were increasingly professionalizing via two-or four-year degrees from normal schools. Since attending normal school during the summer was a means of advancing in the profession, principals and others saw it as a method to improve coaching.
By the summer of 1914, Illinois' president had encouraged the development of a six-week coaches' school run by the athletic department and taught by Zuppke and the basketball, baseball, and track coaches. Their 1915 program had 200 attendees.
Andy Smith, then at Purdue, also ran a coaches' school in 1914, and Harvard, Cal, and Pitt ran them in 1917. Stanford, Penn State, USC, Texas A&M, and Notre Dame joined the club in the early 1920s, with coaches coming from across the country to get the inside scoop and network. (Rockne wrote letters of recommendation based on coaches attending his school.)
The football schools broke off from the curriculum-based approach in the 1920s and sometimes included intrasquad scrimmages among the attendees. Rockne, for example, suffered a concussion in a 1923 game when he used his face to block a Bo McMillan dropkick.
The number of coaches' schools available around the country before 1924 shows Tubbs did not create them; neither did he create the weekend clinic since his 1924 school lasted nearly three weeks. Over time, more teachers and coaches had college degrees, so the longer summer school session fell out of demand.
Coaches' clinics arrived on the scene in the mid-1920s. However, the term initially applied to meetings held after the season in which coaches recommended changes to football rules or before the season to discuss the interpretation of the newly-approved rules.
Shorter, football-only clinics featuring college coaches became the norm by the early 1930s, often tied to state teachers' conventions, all-star games, or the spring scrimmage at colleges that previously held the longer coaching schools.
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