Amos Alonzo Stagg

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Amos Alonzo Stagg, 1906

Amos Alonzo Stagg (born  August 16, 1862 in West Orange , †  March 17, 1965 in Stockton, California ) was an American player and coach in the field of college football . He served as a football coach at various universities in the United States from 1890 to 1946, including at the University of Chicago from 1892 to 1932 , and during that time won seven Big Ten championships with a total of 314 wins, 199 losses and 35 draws Conference and two subsequently awarded unofficial national championship titles. In 1943, the members of the American Football Coaches Association voted him Coach of the Year, and he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as both a player and coach in 1951 and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1959 .

In addition to his work as a trainer, Amos Alonzo Stagg, who was a strong advocate of amateur sport, was also a member of the board of the American Olympic Association and its predecessor organization from 1906 to 1933 . His entire career as a player and coach, during which he fundamentally shaped the development of American football from a variant of English rugby to an independent sport and also influenced the development of the game of basketball , is considered to be the longest in the history of football at over seven decades.

Life

Amos Alonzo Stagg was born in West Orange in 1862, the fifth of eight children , where he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy until 1883 . He then studied theology from 1884 at Yale University , where he played both as a right end on the football team and as a pitcher on the baseball team . He won five conference championships with the baseball team and was voted All-American in football in 1889 . Because of his Christian faith, he had originally planned to become a Presbyterian pastor after studying at Yale , but gave up because of his low voice. He also turned down offers from baseball clubs for a professional career . Instead, he earned a master's degree in physical education ( Master of Physical Education , MPE) at the Young Men's Christian Association Training School , now Springfield College , where he worked in the years 1890/1891 as head coach of the football team.

He then served from 1892 to 1932 for four decades as a football head coach and with the rank of professor as sports director at the University of Chicago . During this time he led the university football team to seven championships in the Big Ten Conference , the teams of the Chicago Maroons from 1905 and 1913 were also subsequently named unofficial national champions. From 1893 to 1905 and from 1907 to 1913 he also coached the university's baseball team and the basketball team in 1920/1921. He was also the athletics coach of the American team at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis and from 1906 to 1933 a member of the board of the American Olympic Association as a representative of the universities or their predecessor organization. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris , he was again one of the coaches of the American athletics team.

After retiring as head coach at the University of Chicago for reasons of age, he moved at the age of 70 to the College of the Pacific , where he also held the position of football head coach from 1933 to 1946 and five championships with the team in the Northern California Athletic Conference won. From 1947 to 1952 he then acted together with his older son as head coach at Susquehanna University . He ended his career in 1960 at the age of 98, after he had coached the football team of Stockton Junior College from 1953 to 1958 and served as an assistant to the team until 1960. His overall coaching record included 314 wins in 199 losses and 35 football draws, 266 wins in 158 losses and three baseball draws, and 14 wins in six basketball losses. He is one of the 13 coaches in college football history who have won at least 300 games with their teams.

Amos Alonzo Stagg was married from 1894 and was the father of two sons and a daughter. He died in a sleep in a nursing home in Stockton, California in 1965 at the age of 102 . His sons both played quarterback at the University of Chicago and, like their father, later served as college football coaches.

Awards and recognition

Amos Alonzo Stagg developed various strategies, team formations, plays and technical aids in football, including the lateral pass , the Statue of Liberty trick play , dummies for training tackles and safety equipment such as protective helmets , hip pads and padded goal posts. He was also involved in the development of the game of basketball at Springfield College with James Naismith , and in March 1892 as a player in the first public basketball game in sports history. The determination of the team strength in basketball to five field players per team goes back to him. He was considered the "Grand Old Man of College Football" (German: Great old man of college football ) and the "Dean of all Football Coaches, the Patriarch of the Game" (German: Dean of all Football Trainers, the Patriarch of the Game ) . By Knute Rockne long, 13 years, the football team of the University of Notre Dame trained and because of his success as one of the most outstanding coach football holds in the history of the College, is the statement "All football comes from Stagg" handed down. The American sports reporter Grantland Rice counted Amos Alonzo Stagg to the three coaches whom he described as the "Great Inventors" (German: great inventors ) of American football. Several dissertations have been written about his life and work so far , for example at East Texas State University , Loyola University Chicago , Michigan State University and Springfield College.

The members of the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA), to whose creation Amos Alonzo Stagg had contributed together with John Heisman and Charles Dudley Daly in 1921 , voted him Coach of the Year in 1943. In 1951 he was inducted into the founding class of the College Football Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach . Eight years later he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame . A primary school in Chicago and two high schools in Stockton and in Palos Hills , a suburb of Chicago , are named after him . Also the Stagg Bowl , the game for the national football championship in Division III of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), as well as the stadiums and football fields at Phillips Exeter Academy, at Springfield College, at the University of Chicago, at the Susquehanna University and the University of the Pacific bear his name. The AFCA has presented the Amos Alonzo Stagg Award since 1940 to individuals, groups or organizations whose achievements have made an outstanding contribution to the further development of American football. With the since 1984 by the United States Sports Academy awarded Amos Alonzo Stagg Coaching Award an outstanding coach is appreciated a men's team annually. In the Big Ten Conference , the Stagg Championship Trophy for the winner of the conference championship game is named after Amos Alonzo Stagg.

Works (selection)

  • A scientific and practical Treatise on American Football for Schools and Colleges. Hartford CT 1893, New York 1894
  • Touchdown! New York 1927

literature

  • Stagg, Amos Alonzo (the Grand Old Man of the Midway) (1862-1965). In: Edward J. Rielly: Football: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2009, ISBN 0-80-329012-8 , pp. 334/335
  • Stagg, Amos Alonzo (1862-1965). In: Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, Andrew Cayton: The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2007, ISBN 0-25-334886-2 , p. 893
  • Stagg, Amos Alonzo (1862-1965). In: Charles Lincoln Van Doren: Webster's Guide to American History: A Chronological, Geographical, and Biographical Survey and Compendium. Merriam-Webster, Springfield MA 1971, ISBN 0-87-779081-7 , p. 1243

Further publications

  • Bob Considine: The Unreconstructed Amateur: A Pictorial Biography of Amos Alonzo Stagg. Amos Alonzo Stagg Foundation, San Francisco 1962
  • Ellis Lucia: Mr. Football: Amos Alonzo Stagg. AS Barnes, South Brunswick 1970, ISBN 0-49-807371-8
  • Robin Lester: Stagg's University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago. University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1999, ISBN 0-25-206791-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Matthews, George R .: America's first Olympics. The St. Louis games of 1904. Columbia, Mo .: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8262-1588-2
  2. ^ Arnd Krüger : American sport between isolationism and internationalism. Competitive sport. 18: 1, pp. 43-47 (1988) ; 2, pp. 47-50 . November 14, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Stagg, Amos Alonzo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American football player and football coach
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH West Orange
DATE OF DEATH March 17, 1965
Place of death Stockton (California)