As far as the fundamentals go, the game seems to him much the same, but when he begins to recollect he sees how far it has really progressed. He recalls how the football coach became a reality and how a teacher of football appeared upon the gridiron.
Better coaching systems were installed as football progressed. Rules were expanded, trainers crept in, intercollegiate games were scheduled and competition and keen rivalry developed everywhere. In fact, the desire to win has become so firmly established in the minds of college men that we now have a finished product in our great American game of football—wonderfully attractive, but very expensive.
Competition has grown to such an extent that our coaching systems of to-day resemble, in a way, the plans for national preparedness—costly, but apparently necessary. All this means that the American football man, like the American captain of industry, or the American pioneer in any field of activity, is never content to stand still. His motto is, "Ever Onward."
It is not always the star player that makes the greatest coach. The mediocre man is quite likely to have absorbed as much football teaching ability as the star; and when his opportunity comes to coach, he sometimes gets more out of the men than the man with the big reputation.
Personality counts in coaching. In addition to a coach's keen sense of football, there must be a strong personality around which the players may rally. All this inspires confidence.
It is a joy for a coach to work with good material—the real foundation of success. The rules of to-day, however, give what, under old standards, was the weaker team a much broader opportunity for victory over physically larger and stronger opponents.
But there are days nevertheless when every coach gets discouraged; times when there is no response from the men he is coaching—when their slowness of mind and body seem to justify the despair of Charlie Daly who said to his team:
"You fellows are made of crockery from the neck down and ivory from the neck up."
Football is fickle. To-day you may be a hero. After the last game you may be carried off on the shoulders of enthusiastic admirers and dined and wined by hosts of friends; but across the field there is a grim faced coach who may already be scheming out a play for next year which will snatch you back from the "Hall of Fame" and make your friends describe you sadly as a "back-number."
Haughton arrived at Harvard at the psychological moment. Harvard had passed through many distressing years playing for the football supremacy. He found something to build upon, because, although the game at Cambridge was in the doldrums, there had been keen and capable coaching in the past.