AMOS ALONZO STAGG

'Amos Alonzo Stagg' (August 16 1862 – March 17 1965) was a renowned American collegiate coach in multiple sports, primarily football, and an overall athletic pioneer. He was born in West Orange, New Jersey, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy. Playing at Yale, where he was a divinity student, and a member of the secret Skull and Bones society^[1][2], he was an end on the first All-American team, selected in 1889.
He later became the coach at Springfield College (1890-92), the University of Chicago (1892-1932), and the College of the Pacific (1932-46) after he was forced to retire from Chicago at the age of 70. During his career, he developed numerous basic tactics for the game (including the man in motion and the lateral pass), as well as some equipment. From 1947 to 1958 he served as an assistant coach under his son at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. In 1924, he served as a coach with the U.S. Olympic Track and Field team in Paris.
He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach in the charter class of 1951 and was the only individual honored in both areas until the 1990s. Influential in other sports, he developed basketball as a five-player sport and was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in its first group of inductees in 1959. A pitcher on his college baseball team, he declined an opportunity to play professional baseball but nonetheless impacted the game through his invention of the batting cage.
On March 11, 1892, Stagg, still an instructor at the YMCA School, played in the first public game of basketball at the Springfield (Mass.) YMCA. A crowd of 200 watched as the student team crushed the faculty, 5-1. Stagg scored the only basket for the losing side.
Known as the "grand old man" of college football, Stagg died in Stockton, California, at 102 years old.
In 1952, Barbara Stagg, Amos's granddaughter, started coaching the high school girls basketball team for Slatington High School in Slatington, Pennsylvania.
Two high schools in the United States, one in Palos Hills, Illinois, and the other in Stockton, California, and an elementary school in Chicago were named after him. The NCAA Division III national football championship game, played in Salem, Virginia, is named after him. And he was the namesake of the University of Chicago's old Stagg Field where, on December 2, 1942, a team of Manhattan Project scientists led by Enrico Fermi created the world's first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction under the west stands of the abandoned stadium, as well as Stagg Memorial Stadium, Pacific's football and soccer stadium. Phillips Exeter also has a field named for him.
The Amos Alonzo Stagg Collection is held at the University of the Pacific Library, Holt Atherton Department of Special Collections.

Contents

Innovations in football

References

External links

Innovations in football

★ huddle

★ putting players' names on the backs of their uniforms

★ lateral pass

★ man in motion

★ numbering plays and playing

★ tackling dummy

★ helmets

References

1. Alexandra Robbins, ''Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power'', Little, Brown and Company, 2002, page 126
2. Robin Lester, ''Stagg's University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-time Football at Chicago'', University of Illinois Press, 1995, page 9.

External links

★ College Football Hall of Fame - biography as coach

★ College Football Hall of Fame - biographer as player

★ Basketball Hall of Fame

★ Stagg Bowl - Division III

★ [1]