As any local football enthusiast knows, Wesleyan’s history with America’s favorite sport goes way back. Wesleyan was one of the first schools in the nation to play the game; the first forward pass ever thrown was by the Cardinals in a 1906 game against Yale. Many at the time thought that the forward pass was merely a passing fad. They were wrong. 

 

Through the University’s long history with football, many alumni have been associated with the game, but perhaps none were as significant as Coach “Norm” Daniels, who passed away this May. His most notable feat was coaching the Cardinals football team to three straight undefeated seasons in 1946, 1947, and 1948. In addition to running the football team for 18 seasons, Daniels coached the baseball team for 33. In his nearly four-decade career, Daniels coached virtually every sport offered by the University and served three terms on Middletown’s city council. 

 

Arguably the most impressive fact about this man, however, is not his athletic record as a coach, but rather the personal testimonials of his former players. Anybody who knew Daniels or played for him remembers him as a kind and gentle teacher, mentor, and role model. 

 

Daniels moved to Middletown from Hillsdale, Michigan in 1934 with his wife Okla, after teaching and coaching in Michigan for a few years. He was a prodigious athlete, having earned nine sports letters at the University of Michigan on top of two degrees. Furthermore, at that time, freshmen were not allowed to play varsity sports, so nine letters was the most an undergraduate could earn. After graduation, Daniels toured Hawaii and Japan for two months as a second baseman. 

From 1934 to 1942, Daniels served as the end line coach for two different football coaches, Jack Blott and Wes Fesler. During this time, he was promoted to head varsity baseball coach, and later, head coach of the basketball team. The University discontinued football after the 1942 season because of World War II, and during 1943 and 1944, the only football offered on campus was intramural, organized by V-12 Navy trainees stationed on campus. During this time, Daniels and assistant coach Butch Limbach took on a slightly different job than they were used to—teaching meteorology to the Navy trainees. A friend of Daniel’s, John Driscoll ’59, recalled that when asked years later how he had managed to teach a full semester of meteorology to Navy trainees, Daniel’s replied, “You just try to stay ahead of them in the book.” 

 

Driscoll, who played quarterback for Daniels, has clear memories of the coach.

 

“I never heard him belittle a player,” Driscoll said. “Never heard him criticize a player.” 

 

While many winning coaches are all about the x’s and o’s, Daniels cared about the players. According to his players, he wanted them to have fun and get the most out of the game. 

 

“The student as an individual has always been paramount in his mind,” one student wrote. 

 

Upon his retirement in 1973, players also reflected on their experiences with “Danny.”

 

“His concern for the well being of a team star may have cost him a touchdown or even a victory on more than one instance when he insisted on substituting a healthy, but perhaps less talented, player,” wrote another of Daniels’ players. 

 

According to those who knew him, the striking thing about Coach Daniels is how much of a regular guy he was, and how committed he was to his values. Each of his players have different memories of Daniels, but most came away with an educational message. 

 

 “We really came face to face with the brutality of racial bigotry,” wrote an ex-baseball player, Bob Gillette ’59, recalling a spring training game from an article in the class of ’59’s 50^th reunion book. 

 

The opposing team had originally refused to play the Cardinals because the University had a black player, Lenny Moore. After a long negotiation with Daniels, the other team finally agreed to play, and Moore hit a triple late in the game. 

 

“Coach Daniels had a smile ear to ear. He was jubilant in his self-contained manner….Danny’s way was to play fairly on and off of the field,” Gillette recalled.

 

Little needs to be said about the football team’s undefeated seasons in the 40’s, other than that those teams broke Little Three records at a rate never to have been matched by any other Little Three team since. After two football-less seasons in 1943 and 1944, the University resumed football with a shortened four-game season in 1945, with Daniels as head coach. They won three games and tied one. 

 

The next season the team went undefeated and untied. Many of the players were older veterans, back from World War II, who had enrolled in college under the GI bill. In John Driscoll’s eulogy for Daniels delivered at his funeral, Driscoll said that he once asked Daniels the key to the team’s winning streak. 

 

“Characteristically, [he] said, ‘it was the players. Those guys just refused to lose,’” Driscoll said. “When I asked some of the former players, they said, ‘it was Norm. Here we were back from war in Europe and the Pacific, he let us play the game, and we loved him for it.” 

 

Whether or not there was a secret to the team’s success, two things are certain: the team had several strong players and Daniels was capable of devising very imaginative plays. In the second game of the 1946 season versus the University of Connecticut, Wesleyan was up 7-0 with only a few minutes remaining in the game (according to legend, the game was played on the soccer field due to repairs on Andrus Field). At fourth down with terrible field position, Daniels had the punter run back to the end zone for a safety, and 2 points for U. Conn. The resulting free kick was one of the best in University history, landing on the one-yard line and driving the opposing team away from the end zone. The Cardinals won, 7-2.

That season, and for the following two, the Cardinals were undefeated and untied. Legendary players such as tackle Jack Geary ’49, halfback Frank Wenner ’49, and running back Charlie Medd were essential to the success of these teams, but there is no doubt that Daniels was the coach that led them to victory after victory.

 

In 1953, as part of a series of articles highlighting various faculty members’ philosophies, Daniels was asked to sum up his philosophy in an essay for The Argus

 

“I have long been convinced that coaches and teachers of physical education have an exceptional opportunity to aid in the character development of young people,” he wrote. 

 

He then concluded by explaining how his philosophy fit into the University’s.

 

“I think the Wesleyan idea of the well-rounded man is vital to the country today,” he wrote. “In the front of the catalogue there is a challenge which has this in it: ‘Wesleyan aims to give to its students every opportunity to train the mind, to build the body, to kindle the imagination, to discipline the emotions, to strengthen the will, to cultivate the conscience.’ My part in this is a small one, but it is a constant source of real satisfaction to me.” 

 

When rumors circulated in 1948 that Daniels might accept a lucrative coaching position at another school, he dispelled these rumors with a terse 7word statement: “I have decided to remain at Wesleyan.”

 

In 2007, in celebration of Daniel’s 100^th birthday, the lobby of the Freeman Athletic Center was christened the “Coach Norm Daniels Lobby.”