Last week we ended our column with a quote from former American football athlete, the late Joe Tomlin who founded the Pop Warner Junior Football (the counterpart of Little League baseball). According to James Michener, author of “Sports in America”, Tomlin set for Pop Warner’s objective “….to familiarize all boys with the fundamentals of football, to provide an opportunity to play the game in a supervised, organized and safety-oriented manner, and to keep the welfare of participants free of any adult ambition and personal glory.” To set the tone for that column, that piece was entitled, “Keep Adult Ambition out of Children’s Sports”.
Who is Joe Tomlin? Doug Reese who had the privilege to meet Tomlin when the latter was 81 years old and was Reese’s then fiancee (Michele) frequent lunch mate together with the 51-year old female receptionist in the law firm where the future Mrs. Michele Reese was working, wrote a touching tribute to Tomlin.
In 1929, Tomlin was a young stockbroker working in New York City, returning home to his native Philadelphia occasionally to visit. On one such visit, a friend who owned a factory in Northeast Philadelphia complained to Tomlin that his business was frequently being vandalized. Other factory owners were complaining of similar vandalism, and they all assumed that local teenagers were to blame. The friend asked Tomlin for some ideas and any help he could offer.
Being a former high school and college athlete himself, Tomlin suggested forming a local youth athletic program to keep the kids busy and “off the streets.” He set up a “Junior Football Conference” for the fall of 1929 comprised of four teams and Tomlin commuted back from New York each weekend to supervise. When the stock market collapsed that October, Tomlin returned to Philadelphia to pursue the cause of youth athletics full time.
Reese adds that by 1933 the Junior Football Conference had expanded to 16 teams and Tomlin was well known among local football coaches. That same year, Glen Scobie “Pop” Warner became the head football coach at Temple and Tomlin met him at a local banquet. He asked Warner to speak at an upcoming youth clinic. When the date arrived for the clinic, Philadelphia was hit by a huge late-season snow storm and Warner was the only coach from a list of coaches to show up. Warner stayed and answered questions for two hours from the crowd of almost 800 eager young players. A few days later, Tomlin renamed his league the Pop Warner Conference.
Tomlin chose the name Pop Warner Little Scholars to underscore that the classroom was just as important as the playing field. To this day, Pop Warner, according to Reese, is the only youth sport organization that requires a minimum academic standard, and rewards its participants for classroom performance. In the 70’s he added a cheerleading organization as a way to offer participation to girls as well.
One of the many noteworthy aspects of the work Tomlin did was creating the perspective that became the driving force behind his life-long cause. And Reese says, Tomlin’s perspective was: It wasn’t about football. It was simply about the kids. Not the parents, not the organization, and not himself. Tomlin had one goal in mind from the beginning and that was to provide an environment for the kids to grow and develop – as people and as students, not necessarily as football players.
The game of football was merely a convenient vehicle for that goal, chosen by Tomlin only because he happened to have started his league during the fall of that initial year, and had some personal knowledge of the sport. It was never about college scholarships. It was never about nursing dreams of playing in the National Football League (NFL). The fact that nearly 70 percent of the NFL players played Pop Warner Football speaks more (of) the endurance of Tomlin’s program based upon its virtues and values, rather than some professed or implicit promise of athletic stardom, according to Reese.
Michener says that youth leagues have been severely criticized because of the misbehavior of parents. Tomlin was determined to keep his (youth league) free of this aberration, and because football does not depend on an umpire’s calling every ball and strike, it lends itself less to parental fury than baseball. At any rate, in the games Michener saw, the kids played and not the parents, but he was told later by one of the coaches, that “moms can be hell on wheels if you don’t play their kids”.
I’m reminded of my own experience at the Philippine Sports Commission when I would occasionally spend more time with parents (some were actually “stage parents” who saw in their children their meal tickets) than with the athletes, trainers, coaches or officials of the National Sports Associations. In the collegiate leagues we have plenty of such stage parents too.