75 years: the publisher looks back

Coach and Athletic Director, Oct, 2006 by Bruce Weber

I love magazines. All kinds of magazines. This one especially--for lots of great reasons. I remember discovering Scholastic Coach in the stacks at McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland forty-some years ago. I recognized Herman L. Masin's name immediately. He had written the sports columns I enjoyed in Senior Scholastic. Who knew that he also edited a magazine for coaches? What a find! Little did I know that I'd spend my entire professional life working with him.

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It turned out that Scholastic Coach was the brainchild of a future Hall of Fame football coach. Herb McCracken, who had played "Pop Warner football." Pop was his coach at the University of Pittsburgh. He started the magazine while he was the head coach at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. At the time, Lafayette was the equivalent of a modern Division I-A team. But football coaching was then a seasonal profession. After each season, Herb would return to New York to run the magazine. The following summer, it was back to Lafayette.

The magazine has only had two editors--the gifted Jack Lippert from 1931-36 and Herman Masin ever since. Right from the start, the nation's leading coaches shared their knowledge with their colleagues in these pages. In the first issue, Andy Kerr of Colgate wrote about the intricacies of his offense, Michigan head coach Harry Kipke covered the Wolverines' punting game, and former national mile champion Ray Conger authored an inspiration piece on cross-country.

But even at the start, Coach was the proving ground for unknown writers who'd eventually become legends in their own right. Take the second issue, for example. It included a persuasive story on the need for including dance in the physical education curriculum. The author was a young physical education major at the University of Pittsburgh, Eugene C. Kelly. It turned out that he knew a little something about his subject. It wasn't many years later that he began thrilling movie audiences with his own dancing. Yes, it was that Gene Kelly.

That was just the start of things. Through the years, Herman was in the business of discovering great young unknown coaches who had something to offer to the profession. A young West Virginia high school football coach named Ben Schwartzwalder reported on coaching clinics before becoming a clinic headliner himself at Syracuse. A Syracuse alum named Al Davis was a young coach at Adelphi College in 1951 when Herman began publishing him. A decade later, after stops at The Citadel, Southern Cal, and the San Diego Chargers, Al was the AFL's Coach of the Year leading the Oakland Raiders. The rest is history. Philadelphia high school coach Jack Ramsay was years away from success at St. Joseph's College and the NBA when his first words landed in these pages. Bill Walsh, long before he was "The Genius," did the same in the early 1960s. And the list goes on.

Throughout the decade of the '70s, Coach was in the clinic business, starting with basketball. John Wooden had already won seven national championships when he arrived in White Plains, NY, for the first one. He was incredible. Everyone wanted a piece of the Wizard of Westwood and the coach held court in the lobby of the Roger Treat Hotel until 4 am, when his last questioner packed it in for the night. And he was ready to go for his first "formal" session at 9!

The clinics helped create lifelong relationships with the greats like Grant Teaff and Charlie McClendon, long before they took over the management of our great partners at The American Football Coaches Association. The immortal Bear Bryant answered questions in a motel in Elmsford, NY, well into the night before an unforgettable clinic appearance.

Perhaps the most unforgettable clinic moment came on a Sunday morning in Allentown, PA, in 1977. John Madden, fresh off a Super Bowl XI win with the Raiders, was at the blackboard, the leading coaching aid of its day, lecturing on special teams--a Madden specialty. Seated in the front row was a surprise visitor, Philadelphia Eagles' head coach Dick Vermeil, notebook in hand, making copious notes. At the end of the fabulous three-hour session, Vermeil walked up to the clinic director and asked if he could talk for a while. Vermeil went on to deliver two unscheduled hours of perhaps the best clinic talk ever.

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At about the same time, we made another discovery. Every coach in America wanted to know more about strength training. That's when we ran into an unknown young coach on Joe Paterno's Penn State staff. Dan Riley called himself "the dumbbell coach," though he was anything but. He began a feature called "The Power Line," which he assembled every month for the next couple of decades. It was a winner--and so was he. By the time he turned the reins over to Michigan State's Ken Mannie, Riley had gone on to the Washington Redskins and, later, the Houston Texans, becoming the role model for many of the nation's great strength coaches.

We can't imagine Coach & AD magazine without Power Line. Nor can we foresee the day when Person-to-Person isn't the backbone of the editorial package. It started, innocently enough, in 1981 with Gerry Faust, a high school coach (Cincinnati Moeller) who had been tapped to take over the football program at Notre Dame. The response from readers was so positive that we knew P-to-P had to continue. Getting it done wasn't always easy. A few months later, the legendary Dean Smith of North Carolina returned a call for an interview. It was 11:30 at night and he called me at home--but that's when he was available. Since then, for 25 years, Person-to-Person has become a virtual who's who of American coaching. You'll find the all-time list elsewhere in this issue.