The Walter Shockley Saga

Lannie Julias has the first entry up in a two-part series detailing his recruitment and coaching experiences with Walter Shockley while an assistant at San Jose State.  Stop on by and get an introduction to the wild and wooly days of coaching in the 1960's before the NCAA had noticeable control over the practices of its institutions and the racial divide was much more prevalent.

All that being told, we needed this player and our head football coach agreed with me that if we were going to get this player, we would need to get him up somewhere close to us. That way, we would have contact with him and could find him a job that would compliment his B.E.O.G. (what was basically that era's Pell Grant) so that he could pay for his tuition and share rent with some present SJSU players who lived off campus (rising senior types).

Again, no letter of intents. Also, there were no 'dead' periods in recruiting. It was an era when 'kidnapping' (with the player's consent) was a common practice. That was a term used for when a week or a few days before the opening of fall practice, a coaching staff would hide a player somewhere so that they could get him on the field for the first day of fall practice. Then he was part of the program and couldn't go anywhere else.

Hat tip: HP 

Comments

[Gina]

My high school sweetheart. I'll love him forever. A wonderful man & player I still remember his days as rushing King at Santa Monica College