Grueling First Practices As soon as he accepted the Harding head football coach position in summer 1959, Carl Allison mailed a summer workout schedule to the prospective players. When preseason practices began in early September, nearly 50 upper classmen and incoming freshmen showed up at newly-constructed Alumni Field. They learned quickly that the new coach meant business. “Very few of them came in condition to play football in any stretch of the imagination,” said Wayne Kellar, a local businessman and Harding graduate who observed the first practice from the sideline. “Carl worked them hard. I saw them laid out from the football field to the road, lying out there vomiting like you wouldn’t believe. He made a big point that day that they had a long way to go. That was the sickest bunch of human beings that I’ve ever looked at in my life. I don’t know why any of them ever came back to practice. I think they learned that day what it was going to take to be a part of a college football team.” Like Jim Citty, who started on the basketball team and was on that first squad, Cliff Sharp was a Harding student who joined the team after two years on campus. Sharp had played football at his hometown high school in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Both Sharp and Citty worked the West Texas oil fields that summer, though not together, and were among the few who were physically prepared for the rigors of preseason training. “Jim and I were in really good condition since we’d worked hard in the hot sun, but at least two-thirds of the guys were not,” said Sharp. “They didn’t know what to expect. The practices were tough. It was brutal for those guys who weren’t in shape. They were puking everywhere. It was awful. Fortunately I wasn’t one of them. To me it was a game. I love for things to be pretty tough, to be a challenge. As crazy as it sounds, I really, really enjoyed it.” “One thing that was evident from the get go was that we were going to work hard,” said Citty. “I mean, it was hot, it was humid, and that was in the days when you were considered out of shape if you drank much water so we didn’t get a lot of fluids.”
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 17:03:47 +0000
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