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Amos Alonzo Stagg
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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, he was an end on the first All-American team, selected in 1889.
He later became the coach at Springfield College (1890-91), the University of Chicago (1892-1932), and the College of the Pacific (1933-46). 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.
Known as the "grand old man" of college football, Stagg died in Stockton, California, at 102 years old.
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.
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
