Here’s an inspiring story about college football … as it was played during another era and at a school that hardly ever makes headlines–at least not today. Back then, it did.
It started modestly for this college football team—1892 was the year—with a single game, a tie, against Baltimore City High School. Bigger games loomed, and quickly too (the very next year), with a contest against the University of Maryland (known as Maryland Agricultural College back then).
Johns Hopkins came after that, as did Navy, Virginia Tech, Temple, Boston College, Georgetown, and others.
In the 1930s, the team added Penn State and West Virginia to the schedule. Maryland was a regular foe and Wake Forest came calling.
Once known as Western Maryland College, today it’s McDaniel College, a liberal arts school of about 1650 students located in Westminster, Maryland (population 18,500). Today, ‘The Green Terror,’ as its sports teams are called, play in Division III’s ‘Colonial Conference.’ Juniata and Moravian are on the schedule regularly, and John Hopkins is the biggest name of the set.
That’s now. Back then, the boys from Westminster played bigger teams with bigger stakes in mind. They were innovators, too.
Famed sportswriter Grantland Rice credits the school with calling the first-ever forward pass play in college football history. It happened on September 28, 1910 when Carl Cleveland ‘Molly’ Twigg threw a forward pass against Lehigh. He threw it not once, but 20 times, to Chandler Sprague, for 350 yards in all.
The 1929 WMC team went undefeated, including shutting out Temple, 23-0, in front of 10,000 fans. Temple went into the game undefeated, having beaten teams by an average score of 24-0. (photo, Hoover Library, McDaniel College)
It was the beginning of big things for Western. The team was undefeated (11-0) in 1929. And from October 1, 1927-December 6, 1930, WMC was true to its nickname—’a terror’—going 32-4-2 overall, including a 27-game unbeaten streak. The string ended with a thrilling 7-0 win over Maryland in a game played in Baltimore.
It wasn’t the only time that Western made national news. In 1934, running back Bill Shepherd (cover photo) led the country in rushing. At season’s end, Shepherd played in the prestigious East-West Shrine College All-Star game.
1934 was a good year, indeed. The team was undefeated in eight games. The only blemish came with a 0-0 tie against Villanova in the season opener. Only one of nine teams scored a point against the Terrors that year. Western was rewarded with an Orange Bowl bid … a bid that it couldn’t accept.
It was The Depression, you see, and WMC couldn’t afford to send a team to Florida. So Bucknell accepted the invitation instead … and won, beating the University of Miami. It wasn’t just any Orange Bowl, though; it was the inaugural Orange Bowl game. And Western missed out on making history … again.
Football embarrassments happened along the way—as they do for all teams in all sports. A 64-0 whitewashing by West Virginia in 1937 stands out, and Western never scored a point in two shutout losses at the Naval Academy’s hands. But over the years, the good has by far outweighed the bad.
The national spotlight on Westminster came again in 1992 when the Green Terror became the first-ever school to play a college football game in the Soviet Union.
Indeed, I think it’s fair to conclude that Western Maryland-McDaniel College is like that ‘Little Train’ that could. It did.
(McDaniel Fight Song courtesy of Brian Patrick Drake and SoundCloud)
https://soundcloud.com/drakecrestmusic/mcdaniel-fight-song-2016
