Unsung McCabe Comes to Harvard By Way of Tailback, Wingback, Iowa

The J. V. coach is often the man nobody knows. His team is made up of players who cannot quite make the varsity, and his games cannot quite make the headlines. He has but one consolation--that his players play football merely because they enjoy the game.

But Ben McCabe needs no consolation, for he is doing what he has always wanted to do. Ever since he was a high school student in Naperville, Illinois, he wanted to be a coach, and especially a football coach.

First step in the evolution of a football coach is to learn to play football. By this yardstick Ben has a thorough grounding in fundamentals. He played two years in grammar school, and four in high school, the last two as varsity tailback. But when he graduated in June 1935, Ben McCabe weighed only 125 pounds.

For a year and a half he worked--in the summer on construction jobs, in the winter in a furniture factory--all with two aims in mind, to gain enough weight to play college ball, and to earn enough money to pay his way through. In the fall of 1937, McCabe enrolled in Iowa State Teachers College. He weighed 160 pounds.

All-Conference Back

In 1938, '39, and '40, McCabe played first string tailback and quarterbacked the team. In his last two years, he was picked as All-North Central Conference halfback. But four years after he had entered Iowa Teachers, Ben had still two terms to go; he was forced to drop out during two spring terms to earn more college money. He got one term in in the fall of 1941. He was drafted in January, 1942.

Basic training, O.C.S., Fort Gelvore, all denoted portions of McCabe's military life. In July, 1944, he was shipped to the ETO where he worked on the Red Ball Express and in an engineering combat battalion with the Ninth Army. V-E day found him on the west bank of the Elbe.

All-American in Paris

A few months later he was back in Paris and playing wingback for an army team in the service football ranks. His outfit piled up an impressive seven and one record, and the local brass invited it to spend a month basking on the Riviera and playing football as the "home team" for Nice. McCabe could go down with the team, or use his points to get a discharge. He decided to go home to his family and the wife he had married early in 1944. Ben came home on Christmas eve in 1945.

He met Art Valpey through his father-in-law, Ozzie Cowles, who was basketball coach in 1947 at Michigan, and is now mentor at Minnesota. After graduating from Iowa Teachers, Ben discovered there was a dearth of high school coaching jobs in Iowa. He went east to Michigan both to visit his wife's family, and to locate a coaching job.

Welcome to Michigan

McCabe found one as coach of all sports at Manchester High, Manchester, Mich., a town 18 miles from Ann Arbor. In 1947 Ben never missed a Wolverine home game; afterwards, he saw the movies and talked with Valpey.

As a result of his research, McCabe succeeded in adapting the Michigan single wing to high school footbal. He simplified it, for example, by making all spins, full spins, and using only the basic plays. He found that without long hours of practice that are impossible in high schools, half a dozen men handling the ball merely increased the possibility of fumbling without conspicuously adding to the deception. Despite waves of injuries to his 25 football candidates, his team came second in the league.

The Changing of the System

When McCabe received the call to Cambridge in August, he was confronted with a problem radically different from that facing his almost legendary predecessor, "Chief" Boston. While the Harlow system instituted the J. V. as a nearly independent team with a head coach and two aids, Valpey called for jayvees to act part of the time as guinea pigs for the varsity.

Ben had no assistants to help him and no precedent to follow.

Ben McCabe believes that his jayvee team has a double purpose. First, it should provide all men who like to play football against outside schools; second, it should give the varsity as much help as it can without utterly ruining its intercollegiate record.

Practice Time

That much of their time was taken up working enemy offenses against the varsity, was clearly demonstrated in the early games of McCabe's first Harvard J. V. team Timing was off, and most players showed unfamiliarity with their assignments.

Saturday, the worm turned. Favored Brown toppled before a smoothly functioning J. V. machine, and the denizens of the Blood Pit could hold up their heads again. After two months, one-man-coaching-staff McCabe had brought his team into the win column without interrupting the system of cooperation with the varsity. As for Yale, "We'll do all right."