New revelations on the likely inception of spring practice at UGA

When was the beginning of spring football practice at the University of Georgia?

For the longest time, the 1914 season was recognized as the earliest associated with football practice in the spring at Georgia. As the story goes, because of a new rule declaring first-year men ineligible to play beginning that year, plus the departure of all-world halfback Bob McWhorter from the year before, Georgia head coach Alex Cunningham abruptly “instituted spring practice,” according to the Atlanta Journal, to better prepare his team for the looming season.

However, correspondence between a previous, brutally honest Georgia head coach and his first team captain has since been discovered, indicating the Red and Black initially held spring football practice even before then.

By the spring of 1901, the University of Georgia had built a reputation for being one of the top academic institutions in the South; however, the school’s athletics, on the whole, had struggled in recent years. Specifically, the football program had mostly obtained ordinary results in its first decade of existence and was already in need of its eighth different head coach by only the tenth season of playing the sport.

Accordingly, team manager Harold Hirsch, a recent graduate of UGA who would soon be attending Columbia Law School, somehow secured the services of William Ayres (“Billy”) Reynolds with a contract giving Reynolds, according to The Red and Black student newspaper, “absolute control over the team.”

Reynolds was a graduate of Princeton where he captained the school’s scrub football team in 1894. He was then the head coach at Rutgers, Sewanee, and Cincinnati each for only a single season before coaching at North Carolina. In four seasons at UNC (1897-1900), he achieved an impressive overall record of 27-7-4, including a perfect 9-0 in 1898. (Reynolds’ .763 overall winning percentage at UNC remains a school record for those coaching multiple seasons.)

What’s more, Reynolds had gone 3-0 against Georgia, blanking the opposition by a combined 113-to-0 score.

According to the Athens Banner, Reynolds, who was still in his 20s, was “one of the best coaches in the South and he tolerates no foolishness on the gridiron.” His hiring was said by The Red and Black to be “the first step towards what promises to be a revolution in athletics [at UGA].”

Years before it was customary for football coaches in the South to hold full-time positions, Reynolds was hired by Georgia on a part-time basis. His primary profession was as a practicing attorney in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, and he hadn’t planned on arriving in Athens to coach the UGA football team for another six months, or only several weeks prior to the 1901 season opener on October 12 against South Carolina. Still, as Reynolds likely first learned at Princeton, where spring practice had been annually held for years, practicing prior to late summer was “a necessity,” Reynolds wrote to team captain and rising junior Frank Ridley in March of 1901, and “I think it’s advisable to commence [spring practice] at once.”

Ridley, who was only two months shy of his 18th birthday when Reynolds contacted him, remains the youngest team captain in the history of Georgia football. And, unlike any other captain before him and ever since, the young Ridley was called upon by his coach in the form of a letter to essentially be the head coach of a middling program in desperate need of practice.

“The first thing to learn is to kick and catch,” Reynolds instructed Ridley. “Do not run away with the idea that the best kicker will always be placed at fullback. It is rather difficult to tell one how to kick.”

Recognized as an “expert” on kicking/punting during the infancy of the sport, Reynolds advocated for all his players—even the linemen—to be able to effectively kick a football. The coach had been “teaching one [kicking] style for years” and believed the best way to understand this style was “to look in last fall’s Outing [magazine] and follow the instructions of Percy Haughton,” who had been an All-American tackle at Harvard, followed by the head coach at Cornell.

Besides kicking/punting, Reynolds noted the importance of kick coverage, and drop and placekicking, “especially long-distance placekicking.” Yet, above all, “catching [kicks] by the whole team is of the greatest importance.”

Reynolds promptly mentioned the Georgia-North Carolina game from the year before, played in Raleigh. At that time, he coached UNC while Ridley was an opposing All-Southern sophomore end. According to the coach, Carolina’s “effectiveness” in catching and returning kicks was the primary cause of its 55-0 rout over the Red and Black.

Besides being able to adequately kick, “all the linemen should practice the spiral pass to the fullback,” according to Reynolds. The coach didn’t forget about the skill positions either, adding for Ridley to “teach all men under 160 lbs. to handle the ball from the quarter[back] position” and “all men should learn to play halfback in spring practice.”

Besides giving on-field instruction in his letter, Reynolds curiously provided his perspective on the sport at Georgia, hoping “it be remembered that football is a science and not a mere game” and “it is criminal the way some colleges conduct their sports.” And “for God’s sake keep politics out of athletics,” Reynolds stressed to Ridley. “Georgia will never take her proper stand among Southern colleges until she breeds and nourishes a better spirit.”

Reynolds asserted a plan needed to be in place “by which a unified Georgia spirit may be developed” and again pointed to the game against North Carolina from the year before as an indication of a lack of spirit.

“Right here I wish to say that after the Georgia game, the Carolina men laughed at the wearing of frat. pins over the [football] sweaters, as was done by some of your men,” Reynolds wrote. “It is to such spirit that your failure may be attributed. I hope I do not offend by such honest statements.”

After indicating Georgia’s exhibition of Greek pride was a reason for its failure on the gridiron the previous fall, Reynolds closed his letter with a final request for the spring: “Kicking, catching, starting and going down under kicks, as well as quarter work, is about all you will be able to do this spring. … Use every honest endeavor to get all the [players] possible.”

Since it would be decades before football practice reports and the like began to be publicized, it’s unknown how the Red and Black’s spring practice in 1901 fared under the direction of Captain Ridley. It’s unclear if Georgia took its first step to properly stand among Southern colleges, in the words of Coach Reynolds, by breeding and nourishing a better spirt.

What does seem clear, at least according to local reporting approximately a month and a half following the Reynolds-Ridley correspondence, the Georgia football squad was suddenly spirit-filled after what could be perceived as a successful spring practice.

“The boys here are enthusiastic over the prospects of the team,” the Athens Banner reported in late April of 1901, with the intention for Georgia “to be in [football] what she is in the intellectual world, the best in the South.”