In Honor of the Most Decorated Senior in Penn Sprint Football History

Cole Jacobson

In any high school or college sport, there are few traditions like Senior Day. Families flock from all over the country to see their brothers, sisters, or children give it one last go on the field or court that has defined their last four years. Underclassmen salute their senior leaders, simultaneously showing respect to their mentors while perhaps wondering what the hell next year’s team will do without them. The seniors look out at the setting and each other, knowing that this could — and probably will — be the last time they’ll all be suiting up together to battle at their longtime home stadium.

But Penn sprint football’s 2019 Senior Day will be a bit different.

The Quakers have some good talent in the Class of 2020, but they won’t just be honoring their 11 senior players before kickoff against Alderson Broaddus this weekend. Penn sprint football’s graduating class includes a man who some thought might never leave, who had a league championship trophy named after him while he was still active, and who has inarguably been the face of the entire CSFL for a literal half-century: head coach Bill Wagner. 

In other words, it’s fair to say those seniors might not get the spotlight they normally would on this day.

Where does one begin when chronicling the career of Wags? Who’s even qualified to try to do so? I hadn’t heard of the man, let alone played for him, until slightly over four years ago; i.e., less than 10 percent of his career as Penn’s coach. Even the longest tenured sprint football assistant coach or Sports Information Director currently at Penn hasn’t been at the university for half of Wags’ career there. Perhaps only legendary former Palestra custodian Dan Harrell, a longtime supporter of the sprint program, might be the last living person to have seen the true development of Wags’ tenure at Penn firsthand. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he has something up his sleeve. But I’ll try to do the best that a 22-year-old possibly can.

If you’re a reader not particularly familiar with the Penn program, here’s a bit of background. Bill Wagner is in his 50th and final season coaching the Penn team. He’s 80 years old, having been born before the first televised NFL game and before the start of World War II, and he’s still coaching a varsity college sports team. He’s a couple of months older than legendary former Kansas State coach Bill Snyder, and even outlasted him by a season, as Snyder retired at the end of 2018. 

For frame of reference, the longest-tenured current FBS head coach is Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz, whose first season with the Hawkeyes was in 1999 — i.e., Wags’ 30th season running the show at Penn. The longest-tenured FBS coach ever is Joe Paterno, whose 46 seasons with Penn State still come up four years short of Wags’ mark. Only two known head coaches at any level of college football (John Gagliardi of D-III St. John’s, and Eddie Robinson of FCS Grambling State) have surpassed Wags’ 50 years at one school.

But while the obscure historical facts might be fun to marvel at, they don’t begin to summarize the quality of the man behind them all. And perhaps the most defining trait of that man throughout his time at Penn is that, whether winning or losing, he went about the process the right way.

So often in college sports, we hear of coaches who strictly view their players as commodities to help them win, and don’t give a damn about them otherwise. Once a player is done contributing to the pursuit of a championship, whether it be because s/he is injured, graduated, or ineligible for some reason, it’s as if s/he doesn’t exist at all to the coach. We’ve all seen “that coach” depicted in fiction and in real life, with some news outlets even going as far as comparing college sports to modern-day slavery. While that might be extreme, it’s clear that a coach who cares about nothing but winning can be problematic. Winning should be the first priority for any coach — after all, it’s the most fun thing I know of — but to do so in the wrong way can alienate a coach from his or her players. 

Wags wanted to win. But his desire to raise a championship trophy was matched by his genuine concern for what our lives were like off the field. He went the extra mile to check in on our grades, not because he wanted to pull all strings to make sure our guys would be eligible to play, but to help set us up for the rest of our lives the best way he could. He would work tirelessly to connect the current players to alumni who were potential career advisors. He didn’t view extracurriculars as distractions hurting our commitment to the football team, as long as we approached them the right way; he viewed them as methods to make us more well-rounded overall men. Hell, look at the entire annual tradition of Penn’s alumni game. Though the weekend’s most obvious purpose is to prepare the current team for its regular season opener, the fact that Wags puts in the effort to allow the alumni to play one more game of tackle football every year, and to set up a career mentorship panel for the current players, is perhaps the most concrete example of how hard he works to promote a culture of family on and off the field, whether you’re a current player or 20+ years past graduation day.

Yet one of the most extraordinary aspects of Wags’ career is that, even with 1,500+ Penn athletes to have played under him (counting his 35 years as a baseball assistant coach), his impact goes beyond the realm of West Philadelphia. Wags’ enthusiasm wasn’t just about making Penn sprint football be the best it could be; it was about advancing the entire sport of sprint football altogether. He didn’t always go into specific details with us on what happened in league-wide meetings, but what we could gather was that when it came to anything that could possibly benefit the league — potential TV coverage, expansion teams, the creation of a championship game, etc. — he was the most vocal guy in the room, without fail. It’s no secret that by nature, sprint football is a difficult sport to grow. It’s a tough sell for a school that already has traditional NCAA football to build a second varsity tackle football program, and it’s a tough sell for a school that doesn’t have it to choose sprint rather than establishing an NCAA D-II or D-III program. Because of this, the fact that the league has doubled in size since the start of the 21st century is no small feat, and it goes without saying that Bill Wagner is the single person most responsible for this. Though there’s no reason they would think about this regularly, players on some of the newer programs like Chestnut Hill and Caldwell likely wouldn’t be playing at those schools, and might not even be playing college ball at all, without Wags’ constant efforts to grow the CSFL.

With all that being said, a dose of reality is necessary. Too often in life, when someone is “departing” in some form, whether that be due to a graduation, a retirement, or a death, we excessively glorify the person’s past. We tend to give off the impression that the person was incapable of any wrongdoing, that they’ll be utterly irreplaceable. I’m not afraid to openly say that Wags was not a perfect coach. His passiveness on fourth down plays irked my teammates and me on multiple occasions. His handling of certain personnel moves was questionable at times, perhaps most recently following the injury to QB Eddie Jenkins in the 2018 season. On a more lighthearted note, he butchered the pronunciation of some last names so badly, ranging from Caltabiano to Wang (or Wanger, as he’d say), that we couldn’t refrain from losing our shit in the locker room.

But this article, and the entire 2019 Collegiate Sprint Football League season, are not about Wags the coach; they’re about Wags the man. And Wags the man is one that literal generations of football players — from Millennials to Baby Boomers, and everyone in between — will remember forever. One who devoted more than half of his life to making sure that both his team and its entire league would thrive despite the myriad of obstacles constantly challenging the sport. One who remains so enthusiastic about his program that he’s promised to take a few snaps with the alumni at QB in the 2020 Alumni Game at 81 years old. (He isn’t actually an alumnus of Penn, but I think 50 years of coaching has earned him the right to suit up with us.)

Where will Wags and the CSFL go from here? It’s impossible to say. Maybe the league will continue to build upon the foundation that he worked so hard to lay down and expand to 12, 14, 16, or even more teams down the road. Maybe the league will collapse as it struggles to replicate the pure passion that Wags provided. Maybe he’ll even pull a Brett Favre and return to action, pushing off the “what if” questions at least another year. 

But while Wags’ impact on the future of the sport remains up in the air, the past is set in stone. And his past has been an outright legendary one. Not every football decision of his was perfect, but when it comes to demonstrating how to fully emotionally invest in something, how to care about others around you more than you care about yourself, and how to maintain an energetic mindset even when there are countless reasons not to, there are few, if any, better teachers out there. 

And that, just as much as the wins and losses, is what will stick with the thousands of athletes lucky enough to learn from him for the rest of our lives.