As the Maroons closed out their first varsity football season since 1942, Fintel Library launched the Roanoke College Football Historical Documents Collection. This project, spearheaded by Digital Technologies & Services Librarian Dave Wiseman, offers a treasure trove of information that is expected to grow over the next few years.
The online database includes clippings about football from Roanoke College’s original yearbook, the Roentgen Rays, from 1898 – 1926; clippings from the Rawenoch yearbook from 1927 – 1943; and Brackety-Ack newspaper articles published between 1915 and 2007.
The collection follows Roanoke's team from its creation in 1892 through the suspension of the program in 1942 due to World War II. Transcripts in the collection were derived from text made possible by either hand-edited optical character recognition or by hand-edited text initially generated by generative artificial intelligence.
A quick skim through the materials within the database reveals that the debate over football continued for years after the team’s suspension. The most recent entry in the database is from the 2007 April Fools’ issue of The Brackety-Ack, in which Assistant Editor Laura (Scuffins) Connelly ’09 wrote an article titled "Football returns to Roanoke College."
In addition to satirical articles, the database also contains a wealth of information on the football program prior to its suspension, including profiles on players, season recaps and photos dating back to 1899.
Highlights include a 1924 Roentgen Rays yearbook entry declaring that then-senior “Smiling Bill” Potter’s opponents “are never able to run a play over him. Potter is probably the best player that ever wore the Maroon jersey.” Another fun find is a poem, titled “The Scrub,” published in the 1928 Rawenoch yearbook to show appreciation for the players’ hard work, that reads:
Give him a headguard. None to spare?
Then weave him a wreath for his tousled hair;
He has won that wreath, by all that's fair.
He has plunged and tackled and played the game;
He has gone in battered and limped out lame;
He has lifted the varsity up to fame.
In addition to Wiseman, this project was made possible by Macy Smith, Dhruv Patel ’27, Juliana Chester ’26, Tekoah Bingham ’28 and Luis Henriquez ’29, as well as the Library of Virginia’s Virginia Chronicle Digital Newspaper Collection.
To access the Football Historical Documents collection, visit https://www.jstor.org/site/roanoke/roanokecollegefootballhistory.