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The West Virginia football team has been established for quite sometime. Since the very beginning this football team has been accomplishing its success with a lot of great players and equally great coaches. It all started on April 20, 1890 when the members of boat and tennis club created the West Virginia University Athletic Association. It was initially organized to help out to solicit funds and establish a football team on the campus of West Virginia University. A play was organized in which Richard III gave full assistance with the funds and by the end of 1890, football team of West Virginia was generated. By the next year, students started organizing football matches amongst themselves. Although it has a recorded lost match to Washington and Jefferson by score of 72-0, the main thing being no African American played football in the varsity team between the years 1891 to 1963.
West Virginia football is said to be the pride of every mountaineer, as everyone feels this pride; whether he grew up in West Virginia or even if he is admitted to the great school. Since 1891, this special school is playing football, and for almost 100 years now, there has been an excitement and pride among whomsoever plays for this state as well as it is an excitement to watch special matches by West Virginia. People define West Virginia University football as action on the field and reaction on the stand, still a mountaineer’s pride. It has created history as it recorded first African American players who played football and to name those great players you have Roger Alfred from Winterville, Ohio, Dick Leftridge from Hinton to name a few.
West Virginia is recorded to have two undefeated regular seasons in 1988 and 1993. But it has also lost both bowl games in Notre Dame as well as Florida. It has celebrated its conference championship thirteen times which includes eight in southern conference and five in Big East conference. It includes its major bowls as Sugar bowl, peach bowl, fiesta bowl, and the Gater bowl too in the 27 Bowl games in which it participated. It celebrated its consecutive eleven wins season in school history in the year 2005 and 2006. It recorded a gold uniform for players in 2007 season. It also has four of the Big East’s top five most rushers in the history of conference mountaineers. It follows the traditional song of “Hail, west Virginia”, which was composed by alumni West Virginia University Earl Miller and Ed McWhorter in 1915.
There had been numerous great coaches whom the history of West Virginia University football has seen and we will have a look at some of the greatest amongst them. The famous undefeated regular season was lead by Coach Don Nehlen. The first coach was Frederick Lincoln Emory in the starting year 1891. George Krebs, Harry Anderson, Anthony Chez, Clearance W. Russell, William Edmunds, Edwin Sweetland, Art Lewis, Jim Carlen, Bobby Bowden, Rich Rodriguez are amongst the other great coaches. The current coach of this great team is Bill Stewart, who has led his team to win in Big East conference in the year 2007 and 2008. He is the 32nd head coach of team who is playing his part as a coach to the best of his ability.
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