The First ...

TigerBlog starts today with what should be a simple question.

Who was the first head coach in Princeton history?

By the way, did you have a good weekend? Hopefully you did.

Anyway, back at the first head coach. This is the kind of historical stuff that TigerBlog loves, by the way. 

The first Princeton athletic event was a baseball game against Williams in 1864. The first football game wasn't until five years later. Somebody must have coached those teams, right?

Well, according to the records, those teams were run by captains, not coaches. TigerBlog already knew that.

He also knew that sports like golf, rowing and lacrosse dated to the 1800s. He also knew that lacrosse dropped the program in the 1800s and didn't pick it up until 1921, and the first program coach wasn't listed until the program started again.

The golf program started in 1897, which is a little later than TB would have guessed before he looked it up. Maybe he thought that because Princeton won 12 national championships and thought they started earlier than 1914.

That left rowing, which dates to 1872. As with the other sports, the earliest teams were led not by coaches but by captains.

For some reason, Princeton dropped rowing in 1878. TB has no idea why, nor can he think of something plausible, since rowing was as big a sport as there was in this country then. In fact, TigerBlog has read somewhere that Andrew Carnegie built a lake and not a football stadium in Princeton because he thought rowing would become a bigger sport.

The rowing program resumed in 1879 - and with an actual head coach, someone named G.D. Parmley. This is a bit murky though, at least to TigerBlog. Was he actually a coach?

Princeton rowing between 1880 and 1884 would have two seasons with a coach and captain listed and three with just a captain. None of those names appears twice. Princeton then dropped rowing again, until 1911, when it came back with the first rowing coach to appear for more than one year.

His name was J. Duncan Spaeth, and he was the coach from 1911 through 1925 (except during World War I). It makes TB think that the two rowing coaches in the 1880s were more captains than actual coaches.

The first head football coach wasn't listed until 1901, when Langdon Lea led the Tigers to a 9-1-1 record. Lea is in the college football Hall of Fame after being an All-American tackle in 1893, 1894 and 1895.

He's not listed as the head coach in Princeton's records until, as TB said, 19091. He was, though, listed as an unofficial coach in 1899 and then the head coach at Michigan in 1900. He also never coached again after the 1901 season, though TigerBlog has no idea what he did after that, until his death in 1937.

TB did find this on Lea's Wikipedia page:
"Last year he took hold of the University of Michigan football team and instilled such a knowledge of the game into the green material he had to work on that he is today acknowledged to be one of the greatest coaches in the country. He could have renewed his contract, said to be worth $4,000. for next season, but sacrificed this sum to become head coach at Princeton, a position not worth nearly so much and one which involves harder work and greater responsibility. … Lea was appealed to and accepted the position. In his undergraduate days Lea was one of Old Nassau's stars. He was captain in 1895 and played the position of left tackle in such a manner as to gain a place on the All America team."

TB is relatively sure that Bob Surace laughed at that.

There would be another head coach in 1902, Garret Cochran, who also lasted one year and went 8-1. He had spent two years at Cal and one at Navy before coaching the Tigers, and he too never coached again.

Garret would later fight in World War I and die of pneumonia on a ship on the way back from Europe. That's what it says on his Wikipedia page at least. He also is a member of the college football Hall of Fame.

The men's hockey and men's basketball teams started in the 1900-01 seasons, but with a difference - men's basketball lists a coach, Mowbray Forney. He went 7-5 that year, his only one as coach.

The baseball team also had its first coach in the 1900 season. That would be Bill Clarke; perhaps you've seen a game at Clarke field at one time. Clarke, by the way, won 564 games in three different stints as Tiger head coach over a 45-year span.

So who does that make the first head coach?

Again, it's murky. Was it G.D. Parmley in 1880? Was it an unnamed and unknown golf coach in 1897?

Was it Langdon Lea's unofficial year in 1899? What made it unofficial? Was it Bill Clarke in 1900? It definitely wasn't Mowbray Forney, since he didn't coach until January of 1901.

Anyway, TigerBlog will tell you tomorrow why he was thinking about all this in the first place.