Mostly known for calling plays, Yale’s football coaching staff has been getting in the game to help register potential bone marrow donors.
Forty years ago, Andy Talley and Larry Ciotti were best friends, roommates, and teammates on the football team at Southern Connecticut State University. Now Talley is in his 28th season as the head coach of the Villanova Football team and Ciotti is the Bulldogs’ running backs coach.
When Talley was contacted by the Be the Match Registry in 2008 to help start drives on other college campuses, Ciotti was more than happy to help his old friend.
“It’s an amazing thing,” Ciotti said. “We can make a difference in life.”
Ciotti added that as the football team began to work on its first drive for Talley’s “Get in the Game, Save a Life” program, Mandi Schwartz ’11 was diagnosed with leukemia. The women’s ice hockey team then joined with the football team in a collaborative effort.
Women’s ice hockey forward Jenna Ciotti ’14 said that the team wanted to begin a donor registration drive as a “search for a match for Mandi within Yale and in her memory.”
That year the Bulldogs registered the most potential donors out of anyone in the “Get in the Game” program with more than 850 registrations, according to Ciotti. Ciotti’s work with the program has had an effect on his players.
“To see how … Coach Ciotti is so passionate about [the drive] made me really want to step my game up last year,” running back Mordecai Cargill ’13 said.
Several other members of the coaching staff have been particularly involved in the program. Head coach Tony Reno said that he works with the players to solicit new potential donors. Volunteer Assistant Chris Gennaro recently donated his bone marrow. He registered at a similar drive in 2009 when he was a member of the University of Maine football team. He stressed that the procedure was painless, and that he hopes to continue working with donor registration drives.
“As long as I’m [at Yale], I’m going to be involved,” Gennaro said.
Director of Football Operations Nick Kray also has ties to the Get in the Game program. Joining the Elis after two years at Villanova, Kray was active in Villanova’s donor registration drives, Ciotti said.
The players have taken the examples of their coaches in working on the drive.
Will McHale ’13 has served as a member of the committee that organizes the Mandi Schwartz Donor Registration Drive, quarterback John Whitelaw ’14 said, but McHale’s role in the program could be adding a new dimension. Ciotti said that McHale was contacted by the National Bone Marrow Registry as a possible donor. McHale declined to comment.
Members of the team who are not a part of the committee are still active in the drive soliciting students to join the registry.
“My main responsibility for the job was being a hawker,” nose guard Chris Dooley ’13 said. “I pretty much harass people on the street and try to get them to sign up for the registry. Not to be arrogant, but I’m pretty good at it.”
Field hockey back Lexy Adams ’13 said she was recruited by a football player to join the registry and became a bone marrow donor. She said that the size of the football team helps the registration drive.
“As a team of around 100 players and each being responsible for their five recruited registrants, [the football team] massively contributes to our large turnouts each year,” Adams said in a message to the News. “[O]n the day of the drive, the football players stake themselves out on Cross Campus, Old Campus and Commons to convince people to make it over to the drive — and with the numbers we’ve registered in the last four years, they are pretty darn good at it.”
So far, the drive has found 14 matches that have led to life-saving bone marrow donations.
When the football team leaves campus Thursday evening for its season opener at Georgetown, quarterback John Whitelaw ’14 will not be on board.
Whitelaw announced his departure from the football team in an email to his teammates Tuesday, the News has learned. His decision comes in the wake of head coach Tony Reno’s announcement that Eric Williams ’16 would start at quarterback against Georgetown on Saturday. After spring practice last year, Whitelaw had widely been expected to be named starter in the fall.
The loss of the veteran Whitelaw is the latest in a string of offseason obstacles for the Bulldogs. Following controversies over the resignation of former head coach Tom Williams and the Rhodes Scholarship candidacy of Patrick Witt ’12, the team experienced another setback in August when linebacker Will McHale ’13 had his captaincy suspended following a fight at Toad’s Place in May.
Prior to his leaving the team, Whitelaw was featured in head coach Tony Reno’s game plan for Saturday and both Whitelaw and Williams were listed as possible starters on the media depth chart.
“Eric will start, I made a decision over the weekend,” Reno said at a lunch with members of the media yesterday, prior to Whitelaw’s announcement. “[But] John [Whitelaw] will play.”
Reno said that Whitelaw left the team “to pursue other interests.” He added, however, that Whitelaw’s departure would not affect his young quarterback.
“I don’t think there’s any more pressure at all [on Williams],” Reno said. “He’s got 10 guys [with him].”
Although he has never taken a collegiate snap, Williams has already gained the confidence of his teammates.
“I’ve just been really impressed by Eric’s raw talent,” running back Mordecai Cargill ’13 said. “He is a freshman so he makes mistakes here and there, like dropping the ball sometimes or causing us to do extra running at the end of practice. But there are also times he makes throws that wow you.”
Williams is also no stranger to Yale — his brothers Sean Williams ’11 and Scott Williams ’13 have both played for the Blue and White.
Derek Russell ’13 and Logan Scott ’16 will be the new primary back-ups, Reno said.
Russell is listed as a wide receiver on the roster and has spent the past three years on the junior varsity team. He threw for 2,100 yards and 21 touchdowns as quarterback for Newton South High School in 2008. He also ran for 500 yards and eight more scores.
Scott was a three-sport athlete for Chaminade College Preparatory School in California and was recruited to play a sport at Boise State, Nevada and San Diego State, among other schools.
Whitelaw was unavailable for comment, and several of his former teammates declined to comment, with one of them doing so because Whitelaw’s departure was “a sore subject.”
Whitelaw saw action in five games last year, completing one of four passes for eight yards and running for fourteen yards on five carries. He spent his freshman campaign on the JV squad, but he received the spring practice quarterback award in 2012.
When the football team leaves campus Thursday evening for its season-opener at Georgetown, quarterback John Whitelaw ’14 will not be on board.
Whitelaw announced his departure from the football team in an email to his teammates Tuesday, the News has learned. His decision comes in the wake of head coach Tony Reno’s announcement that Eric Williams ’16 would start at quarterback against Georgetown. After spring practice last year, Whitelaw had widely been expected to be named starter in the fall.
Prior to his leaving the team, Whitelaw was featured in head coach Tony Reno’s game plan for Saturday and both Whitelaw and Williams were listed as possible starters on the depth chart.
“Eric will start, I made a decision over the weekend,” Reno said at a lunch with members of the media yesterday. “[But] John [Whitelaw] will play.”
Reno said in an interview Tuesday evening that Whitelaw left the team “to pursue other interests.” He added, however, that Whitelaw’s departure would not affect Williams, his rookie quarterback.
“I don’t think there’s any more pressure at all [on Williams],” Reno said. “He’s got 10 guys [with him].”
Derek Russell ’13 and Logan Scott ’16 will be the new primary back-ups, according to Reno.
Russell is listed as a wide receiver on the roster and has spent the past three years on the junior varsity team. He threw for 2,100 yards and 21 touchdowns as quarterback for Newton South High School in 2008. He also ran for 500 yards and eight more scores.
Scott was a three-sport athlete for Chaminade and was recruited to play a sport at Boise State, Nevada and San Diego State among other schools.
Whitelaw did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon and evening, and several of his former teammates declined to comment, with one of them doing so because Whitelaw’s departure was “a sore subject.”
Whitelaw saw action in five games last year, completing one of four passes for eight yards and running for fourteen yards on five carries. He spent his freshman campaign on the JV squad, but he received the spring practice quarterback award in 2012.
Under the management of new head coach Tony Reno, Yale’s football program is already seeing major changes. For starters, this fall will be the team’s first season without a captain in its 140-year history.
Linebacker Will McHale ’13, who was voted captain of the team last winter, had his captaincy suspended following an altercation in May at Toad’s Place in which he allegedly punched another student in the face. Reno said that McHale will not be reinstated or replaced as captain, and that the player who will represent the Bulldogs at the opening coin toss will be decided each week by a special vote by the players.
Reno took over the reins as the 34th head coach of Yale football last spring and has been picking up the speed of Yale football ever since.
Under the new coaching staff, the Bulldogs will shake things up on both sides of the ball. Tight end Kyle Wittenauer ’14 said that the Blue and White will be employing a spread offense to open up the field and create pressure.
Nose guard Chris Dooley ’13 added that the Elis will be switching to a 3–4 defense, as opposed to the four defensive linemen, three linebacker alignment deployed under previous head coach Tom Williams.
“I like the 3–4 better because it is harder [for the offense] to block,” Dooley said. “In the 4–3 there was less pressure on me because I wasn’t getting double-teamed … [but] I like the pressure.”
The transition to the no-huddle spread offense is one of the differences between Reno’s tenure as head coach and his previous 2003-’08 stint with the Bulldogs as a wide receiver and defensive secondary coach, he said.
In addition to the game plan, Reno has also changed the way the team practices. Recalling the methods of former head coach Jack Siedlecki, Reno has split practices into shorter periods.
“[Periods are designed] to keep practice structured and to keep drills and routines moving,” Reno said.
The change has led to more intense practices, players said. Wideout Cameron Sandquist ’14 added that the practices have already shown dividends in the spring game and in scrimmages.
“We’ve just seen how by overtraining in practice and keeping the tempo high in practice we can keep our opponents on their heels,” Sandquist said. “It helps slow the game down for us … allows us to be a lot more comfortable.”
Even with the heightened intensity, the team has lost only three members since preseason started earlier this month. One freshman walk-on and two upperclassmen had quit the program by the first day of practice, according to Reno, though he added that one player may decide to return upon resolving personal issues.
Wide receiver Chris Smith ’13 will also not be playing this season. Reno said Smith has taken the fall semester off for personal reasons, but will return to the Yale Bowl for the 2013 season. Smith was second on the team with 28 receptions last year and had a team-high 602 yards and six touchdowns before an injury sidelined him for the last two games of the season.
The team will also have to replace leading rusher running back Alex Thomas ’12 and quarterback Patrick Witt ’12. John Whitelaw ’14 is poised to take over as the signal caller, and running back Mordecai Cargill ’13 will fill Thomas’ absence. Last year, Cargill showed his potential at Columbia on Oct. 29, when he rushed for 230 yards and two touchdowns to lead the Elis to a 16–13 win on a snowy day at the Baker Bowl.
Defensively, the Bulldogs are returning just three starters from last year’s squad. The defense will be led by McHale, who has 133 tackles and three interceptions in his Yale career.
The football season will begin Sept. 15 at Georgetown.
William N. Wallace ’45W, a former New York Times sports writer and lifelong Yale football fan, died Aug. 11 of acute myeloid leukemia in Norwalk, Conn. He was 88.
Wallace’s sportswriting career began at the News, where he covered football and other sports as a Yale undergraduate. After graduation, he reported on local sports for several New York newspapers before joining the Times in 1963.
Wallace wrote about Ivy League football for the Times and was one of the first reporters in the country to cover professional football on a national scale. Wallace received the Dick McCann Memorial Award from the Pro Football Writers of America in 1986 for his pioneering coverage and his contributions to the field. Throughout his career Wallace wrote extensively about professional football and myriad other professional and collegiate sports, including baseball, yachting and crew, though he always held a special spot in his heart for Yale football.
Wallace’s daughter, Carol Wallace Hamlin, said his passion for sports started at a young age and never relented.
“Sports was a metaphor to him — a narrative,” she said. “He was always able to turn a sporting contest into more than the number of innings or downs.”
In 1934, Wallace, aged ten, attended the famed Yale-Princeton football game at Palmer Stadium. Eleven Bulldogs played both offense and defense with no substitutions for the entire 60-minute game. That roster snapped the Tigers’ two-year, 15-game winning streak, and inspired Wallace’s book, “Yale’s Ironmen” 71 years later. Wallace’s last article of his 44-year career at the New York Times was a Dec. 2007 obituary of James DeAngelis ’35, the last surviving member of the 1934 lineup.
Wallace was a fixture at the Yale Bowl on Saturdays for more than sixty years and rarely missed a home game. Even after his retirement from the Times he kept and was re-issued press credentials so that he could continue to watch the game from the press box.
Steve Conn, Yale’s associate athletics director, said Wallace focused carefully on every play.
“It wasn’t a time to ask questions during the game, but he was always happy to share his thoughts at half-time or after the game,” Conn said.
By his own admission, Wallace was too small to be a serious football player, but he had a passion for the game that he combined with his gift for writing over the course of a distinguished career. Wallace had a talent for bringing together the things he loved — Yale, football and writing. Until this year he organized a group of former Yale newsmen spanning more than thirty years in age that gathered regularly for lunch at Mory’s. The group most recently met in April, when they sat at their usual table under a photo of the Yale Ironmen.
During his time at Yale, Wallace was a catcher for Branford College’s baseball team and also wrote a football column for the News. He graduated in 1949 with a B.A. in history after serving four years in World War II. Wallace was a prominent figure on campus, according to his classmates, and was described by his friends as fiercely loyal to everyone around him.
“He was the kind of man who made a friend wherever he went,” said John Rohrbach ’45W, Wallace’s friend and colleague at the News. “He wasn’t casual about his acquaintances though: friendship for him was a long-lasting affair.”
Donald Marshman ‘45, a fellow member of the Mory’s group along with Rohrbach, added that Wallace always seemed to be heading off to another corner of the country for classmate’s birthdays, anniversaries or other special events.
Wallace served as corresponding secretary for the class of ’45W and was responsible for compiling the class notes that are included in every issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine. As the members of a class grow older, it increasingly becomes the job of the corresponding secretary to bear notice of his classmates’ deaths, most often in two or three brief sentences. But Marshman said Wallace treated his role differently.
“[He] would write little biographies for each one, so that in each issue there would be five fairly lengthy paragraphs,” he said. “It was partly because he was a journalist and he was doing what came naturally, but that work takes time and effort, and he put it in happily. He was very loyal to his class and to Yale.”
Wallace never quit reporting on the Bulldogs, and his readers never quit following. For the last few years of his life, Wallace wrote and distributed a newsletter on Yale football entitled “Bullpoop.” Set up as a humorous fictional conversation between the old, romantic “Bull” and the younger, better-informed “Dog,” Wallace’s Bullpoop recapped football games and discussed current events and Yale football trends.
“I was amazed at the length of the list of his followers,” Richard Mooney ’47 said. “As far the Yale circuit was concerned, he was Yale football.”
While he distributed his newsletter to a few hundred Yale alumni, his nephew Sanford Miller added that many subscribers would send out “Bullpoop” to more people, and readership was likely in the thousands. Wallace’s last issue came out on Apr. 22 of this year.
Wallace remained passionately concerned with the changing state of Yale Athletics for the entirety of his life.
“He was adamant about the fact that Yale sports were a huge part of the culture of the Yale he and his fellow Yalies knew,” Chelsea Janes, a former sports staff columnist for the News, said. Wallace gave a speech at a Yale class dinner in October 2011 on the subject of athletics and admissions, she added.
“In the hospital when we visited him 10 days before he died, he was still going on about the plight of Yale’s recruiting,” Wallace Hamlin said. “Right up to the end he was paying attention to what was going on, he was so keen on the institution of Yale.”
In addition to his daughter Wallace Hamlin, Wallace is survived by his wife, Linda; three other daughters, Eve and Josephine Wallace and Alexis Silverman; a stepdaughter, Samantha De Refler; a sister, Susan Drake; and five grandchildren.
Yale football captain Will McHale ’13 had his captaincy suspended Saturday due to a fight he had in May with another male student.
McHale, who was arrested May 15 by Yale Police, faces a charge of creating a public disturbance, an infraction. He has not yet entered a plea, and is due to appear in court on Friday.
A Saturday press release by Yale Athletics announced that McHale requested the suspension.
“Will made a poor decision and his actions are unacceptable to Yale and our football program,” Head Coach Tony Reno said in the Yale Athletics statement. “He remains an important part of our team, and I fully expect him to work to restore his credibility in the Yale community while remaining a leader on and off the field.”
In the release, McHale said he hoped to put the matter behind him and “regain the trust and confidence that comes with being a member of the Yale football team.”
McHale was elected as the 135th captain of the Yale football team Nov. 17 in a unanimous vote by his teammates. He has 133 career tackles and was second-team all-Ivy in 2011.
A Yale football player received a rookie free agent contract after last weekend’s NFL draft.
Jake Stoller ’12, a defensive tackle, signed a free agent contract with the Pittsburgh Steelers after the draft finished April 28. Quarterback Patrick Witt ’12, who participated in the annual NFL combine earlier this year, remains unsigned.
Stoller was one of twelve rookies who signed with the Steelers after the draft. He recorded 4.5 sacks his senior season on his way to being named second team All-Ivy. He also received Yale’s Jordan Olivar Award, which is awarded to the Yale football player most respected by his teammates.
Witt is looking to join Stoller in the NFL. The quarterback was scheduled for a tryout with the Atlanta Falcons this weekend, and Stoller said Witt is in contact with several other teams, whose names he would not disclose.
In three years with the Blue and White after transferring from Nebraska, the 6’4” quarterback completed 60.1 percent of his passes for 37 touchdowns. The Bleacher Report’s Zachary Rymer argued that Witt’s draft stock may have been hurt after The New York Times reported in January that a Yale student had filed an informal complaint of sexual assault against Witt.
The author points out the similarities between Lebron James and former Yale quarterback Patrick Witt ’12, noting their shared ability to make headlines.
“With Lebron’s rapidly receding hairline in mind it’s clear that being the center of attention can come with its pressures,” the article states. “That’s something Yale QB Patrick Witt should be familiar with.”
The article also claims that Yale’s football team tends to vanish in the fourth quarter, just like the Heat. We can’t really argue with that, but we can say that Yale’s new coaching lineup includes several defected Cantabs, and that the Crimson should be ready for fire in fall 2012.
On Friday, fans of Yale football got their first glance of a scene that will be commonplace come next fall: head coach Tony Reno surrounded by members of his team. But the setting was not the Yale Bowl.
Reno held a Master’s Tea in Davenport on Friday as part of his initiative to bring together the football team and the student body closer together.
“At any football program that is successful, there’s a connection between the college and the school,” Reno said. He added that he wanted the team to be involved not just in the community at Yale, but also in New Haven.
Davenport students on the football team — including offensive backs Collin Bibb ’13 and Chris Brady ’14, outside linebacker E.J. Conway ’15, defensive end Dylan Drake ’13 and offensive lineman Evan Ellis ’12 — all accompanied Reno.
At the beginning, Reno stressed how important the residential college system is, both for the football team and the college itself. He added that he shows recruits the residential colleges and holds a dinner for them to meet masters and deans during their official visits.
The focus of the talk then switched to the football program.
“What you’re going to see on the field is a group of players who play the game the right way,” Reno said, adding that the team will play with a fast, aggressive style that pressures the opposition on defense and keeps them on their heels with a no-huddle offense. That offense will be a departure from the scheme former head coach Tom Williams employed, but will resemble the attack that Harvard used to devastating effect in its 45–7 victory at The Game last fall.
The talk then transitioned into a panel discussion, with the few members of the audience — less than a dozen people attended — asking questions of Reno and his players.
When asked how the residential colleges could help the student-athletes get more out of their Yale experience, Drake recommended planning events in line with the athletes’ schedules.
“The biggest thing is that a lot of the weeknight study breaks and social events are … a little late when we’re trying to get our school work done and have morning lift,” Drake said. “I feel like that’s one of the things that I miss out on: the opportunity to go down and socialize with my fellow Davenport classmates and some of the younger students that aren’t athletes, because the athletes kind of run in the same circle.”
Davenport Master Richard Schottenfield ’71 and Drake then discussed how moving college-wide events to earlier in the evening or opening the college’s buttery at 9:00 p.m. instead of 10 would allow for more interaction between all Davenport students.
In response to an audience member’s question, both Reno and his players shared their views about what makes an ideal coach.
“First, of all I am ultra-competitive, [so] I need someone who hates to lose,” Bibb said. “For how much people care about Yale football … there’re just too many people that have put in effort to the season to have someone that will tolerate not giving 100 percent.”
Reno said the most important quality in a coach is integrity.
Reno and the Elis will take the field March 28 for the first spring practice of 2012.
When Calvin Hill ’69 received a call from the Dallas Cowboys informing him that he had been selected as the team’s first-round pick in the 1969 NFL Draft, he thought it was a joke.
Earlier that day, Hill had called his Yale teammate Bruce Weinstein ’69 pretending to be an official from the New York Giants and tricked him into believing that he had been selected in the second round of the draft.
“I just started laughing,” Hill said. “He got really pissed off. I locked my door because he’s a big guy.”
Forty minutes later, Hill’s phone rang, and he assumed another one of his teammates was trying to pull a similar prank on him, so he played along. It was not until he got on the phone with Tom Landry, the head coach of the Cowboys at the time, that he realized this was no joke.
After starring at Yale as both a running back and a jumper on the track team, Hill went on to play professional football and enjoyed a successful 12-year career in the NFL. Today, Hill is still regarded as one of Yale’s greatest athletes. But his teammate at Yale, Kurt Schmoke ’71, said Hill’s success was an anomaly in that era.
“A lot of Ivy League athletes weren’t even given the chance during that particular era to compete at the pro level,” Schmoke said. “He was given the chance and he demonstrated what a great star he could become.”
But Hill said the Yale experience itself was a huge life opportunity for him. Yale taught him how to succeed — a lesson he applied even after he left New Haven, he said.
“It really teaches you to figure out where your boundaries are and you learn to go beyond where you thought perhaps you could go,” Hill said. “I always thought that Yale gave me that confidence. It didn’t matter what the challenges were after Yale — I felt somehow I could figure it out.”
HIGH SCHOOL
Though Hill grew up in Baltimore, he left his hometown in ninth grade to attend boarding school at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, N.Y., after winning a scholarship.
Hill’s first encounter with organized football was at Riverdale. It was also at Riverdale that Hill first developed into a star on the gridiron.
His senior year, Hill was named to Parade magazine’s 1964 high school All-America team as a quarterback and was heavily recruited by many colleges, including Ivy League schools. However, Hill did not initially consider the Ancient Eight seriously. Instead, he harbored hopes of attending a big football school from the Pacific-8 (now the Pacific-12) or the Big Ten and was especially drawn to football powerhouse UCLA.
Nonetheless, on Riverdale’s college visitation day for seniors, Hill decided to visit Columbia. But Hill said that decision was motivated more by an excuse to skip class for the day than by genuine interest in the Ivy League.
When he returned to Riverdale and told one of the football assistant coaches there that he had gone to see Columbia, the coach assumed Hill was considering Ivy League schools and arranged for him to visit Yale that weekend.
“He was a pretty tough coach, and I didn’t want to let him know that I was more interested in missing class than I was going into the Ivy League,” Hill said.
But that weekend in New Haven changed Hill’s attitude towards the Ancient Eight. During his stay, he attended a football game and watched the Bulldogs defeat Dartmouth, 14–7, in front of a crowd of 70,000 people at the Yale Bowl. Hill was also impressed by Yale’s “gorgeous” campus, urban location and proximity to New York City.
“It was a really spectacular visit,” Hill said. “I came back kind of reinvigorated about the Ivy League and started thinking about some of the other schools. But I always liked Yale.”
In the end, Hill turned down all the football scholarships offered to him and decided to become a Bulldog.
BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS
Despite being an All-American quarterback in high school, when Hill first arrived at Yale he was only the third-string fullback on the freshman team.
“It wasn’t the greatest thing for my confidence,” Hill said. “I had gone from the top of the mountain to the base of the mountain.”
But it was not long before Hill was climbing toward the top. In a game against Princeton his freshman year, Hill — who played as both a fullback and a linebacker for the freshman team — led the Bulldogs to a win by scoring five touchdowns, intercepting a pass, forcing a fumble and blocking a punt.
[ydn-legacy-photo-inline id=”2158″ ]
His junior and senior seasons, Hill earned first team All-Ivy honors as a running back and helped lead the Bulldogs to Ivy League Championships in 1967 and 1968. His senior year, the Elis went undefeated, though Hill’s final football game at Yale ended with the infamous 29–29 tie at Harvard. With the Bulldogs leading 29–13 and 45 seconds left on the clock, Harvard launched an improbable rally and scored 16 points to tie the game and earn a share of the Ivy League title.
“It just shows you what can happen,” Hill said. “Everything went right for Harvard, and everything went wrong for us. It was a forgettable day.”
Hill’s athletic talents also extended to the track. Though he joined the team mostly to stay in shape for football season, Hill became one of the best jumpers in school history. In his first ever meet, Hill’s mark in the long jump beat not only all of the freshmen, but it also exceeded the best varsity jump on the team.
Hill went on to become a double champion in both the long jump and triple jump at the Outdoor Championships in 1968 and helped the Elis capture the Heptagonal Championship his senior year, when he once again won individual titles in the long jump and triple jump. He still holds the school record for the outdoor triple jump.
Hill’s athletic abilities also earned him the respect of his teammates both on and off the field.
“Having all that ability and talent, he was a nice guy,” Ed Franklin ’69 LAW ’73, a former defensive back and teammate of Hill, said. “He was not inflated with himself.”
When he was not competing for Yale, Hill immersed himself in campus culture. He pursued a major in history, with a particular interest in Russian history and the antebellum South. Outside of class, Hill was a brother in the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, although he said that “they weren’t quite as wild as they seem to be now, from what I read.” Hill also was a member of Black Students at Yale from its inception and belonged to St. Elmo Society.
ENTERING THE DRAFT
Even with his successes as a football player, Hill’s initial career plan involved continued education, not the NFL. In fact, Hill said his primary reason for attending Yale was always the education. Although he had been drawing interest from professional teams, his original goal was to enroll at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Hill said he hoped he would be drafted or sign a free-agent contract with a team so that even if he ended up getting cut, he could make enough money to pay for two years of divinity school. But Hill never expected to be drafted in the first round.
“It was a shock,” he said. “It was totally out of left field because it wasn’t something I had been planning on doing.”
Still, Hill continued to excel on the gridiron. In his rookie year with the Cowboys, he rushed for 942 yards and scored eight touchdowns, earning Offensive Rookie of the Year honors and a selection to the Pro Bowl.
Hill said his transition from collegiate to professional athletics was an easy one.
“I was doing basically the same thing I had done at Yale,” he said. “In some respects you didn’t have class to worry about … [That] took a lot of discipline, whereas when you were through with football practice in the pros you just went home.”
In 1972, Hill became the Cowboys’ first-ever running back to break the 1,000-yard mark for the season in a game against the Redskins, finishing the season with a total of 1,036 yards. That year proved exciting for other reasons: Hill and his wife, Janet, welcomed the birth of their son, Grant, who would go on to collegiate glory at Duke and a successful career in the NBA with the Pistons, Magic and Suns. Hill’s football season culminated with a championship ring, as the Cowboys defeated the Miami Dolphins 24–3 in Super Bowl VI.
The following year, Hill broke his own franchise record by rushing 1,142 yards and earned his third Pro Bowl selection.
After six seasons with Dallas, Hill left the NFL to compete with the Hawaiians of the World Football League for one season before returning to the NFL to finish his career with the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Browns.
LIFE AFTER THE NFL
After retiring from the NFL, Hill stayed on with the Browns as a consultant and helped develop player programs to provide support for athletes who were struggling with substance abuse. In 1986, he joined the board of directors of the Baltimore Orioles and eventually became vice president of the club from 1987 to 1994. Hill hired future MLB general manager Theo Epstein ’95 in 1992 to work for the Orioles. Hill now works as a consultant for the Cowboys.
Hill also has remained connected to the New Haven community even after he graduated. During his rookie season with Dallas, his Yale teammate Schmoke approached him and asked if he would give his name to a daycare center a group of undergraduates were founding to help with fundraising efforts. That center, the Calvin Hill Daycare Center on Highland Street, has been in continuous operation for over 40 years.
Schmoke said that while Hill was an outstanding football player in college and professionally, his character was also exemplary.
In November 2010, Hill returned to the Yale Bowl to receive the Doak Walker Legends Award for his achievements as a collegiate football player and his dedication to the community.
Hill appreciates Yale as much as Yale appreciates him.
“[Yale] was a wonderful community,” he said. “The four years — they were some of the best years of my life.”
Former Yale football head coach Tom Williams has signed on as safeties coach at the University of Texas at El Paso, according to reports.
Pete Rousel of coachingsearch.com first reported on Sunday that Williams had accepted a position on the UTEP staff under head coach Mike Price; the New Haven Register later confirmed Rousel’s report. The safeties position became available when Al Simmons left UTEP to become the co-defensive coordinator at Colorado State University.
Over his three seasons leading the Bulldogs, Williams compiled a 16–14 record before resigning in December following allegations that he had overstated his record as a Rhodes Scholar. For Williams, the new position will be a homecoming — he grew up and played high school football near Fort Worth, Texas before heading to Stanford.
Williams’ last game at Yale ended in a 45–7 loss to Harvard.
