UCSD: From Humble Beginnings

     

    As soon as I sign my lucrative professional athlete contract, the second thing I will donate to UCSD will be the first-ever UCSD Athletics Museum. But my first order of business will be to name the football stadium “Hurwitz Field at Penny Rue Stadium” to showcase the young but (to me, at least) incredible story of the program.

    To find out more about the early history of Triton athletics, I went to the Mandeville Special Collections Library to pan for gold in the archives. To clarify, Mandeville Special Collections is inside Geisel Library, not in the Mandeville Center (which is completely covered in spray paint). If you even did so much as bring a can of spray paint to the Mandeville Special Collections archives, university prosecutors would recommend the death penalty. It’s clean in there.

    I went through the first file of news releases related to our sports program, and I was instantly taken aback by the sheer amount of history I hadn’t seen anywhere else. The “tradition of excellence” motto is true for both academics and athletics dating back to the very first Triton squad.

    Case in point: UCSD’s very first athletics team played its first soccer match in December 1963. Yes, there was a time in UCSD’s history when every single athletic team was undefeated. UCSD’s team of 11 Ph.D. candidates and three who already had received Ph.D.s defeated the University of Baja California’s School of Marine Sciences 2–0.

    Triton diehards will remember great soccer legends like Dr. Archie Hendry, Tony Bowen and Giovanni Caprioglio, who all made the San Diego Soccer League All Stars Team in 1964. Most of the players were graduate students at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, but Hendry had already received his doctorate and was 27 when the team formed. Two other players were graduates of Cambridge and Oxford and Caprioglio, who had also completed his graduate work, was actually taking time off from his full-time engineering job to participate in the inaugural Triton squad.

    And I thought it was hard enough to balance my own undergraduate social sciences classes with my athletic activity! (Most recently, I played center on an intramural men’s basketball team aptly named “Slam Dump.” We lost every game.)

    UCSD’s sailing team launched in January 1965 and hosted a seven-UC campus tournament in 1966. Triton basketball launched under Coach Jack Shawcroft and lost its first game to UC Riverside on Dec. 4, 1965. The team’s 16 players were selected from a tryout of 56 students, and the first game was played in the La Jolla Country Day School’s gymnasium.

    Among the first team’s ringers were Steve Montgomery, Israel Chaves, Jim Cole and Steve Edny. A San Diego Union-Tribune story I found praised Montgomery. Still, Montgomery’s stats aren’t on ESPN’s stats archives, But then again, neither is any reference to Triton basketball. We’ll work on that.

    UCSD’s first documented defeat over San Diego State University in something other than academics (which occurred in November 1960) came on Jan. 11, 1967, when Triton wrestlers defeated the Aztecs 21–11.

    UCSD’s now-dried-up Triton fishing team participated in a tournament against UCSB, UCLA and USC in 1967. We came is Bass Place in the meet.

    Modern Division-I programs tend to have the appearance of a built-in athletic legacy. Last month’s basketball Cinderella sweetheart Florida Gulf Coast University’s average freshmen are three years older than the university itself, yet the school now has a pair of tournament wins, whereas ancient programs like that of Northwestern University, have failed to yield a bid to the big dance even as they boast success in a variety of other programs). UCSD may not be D-I (yet), but the history and “tradition” of the student athletes on campus here has already been solidified, and even if they’re buried in a folder in a box in a part of Geisel no one has heard of, their legacy has become part of the university’s history.

    More to Discover
    Donate to The UCSD Guardian
    $200
    $500
    Contributed
    Our Goal

    Your donation will support the student journalists at University of California, San Diego. Your contribution will allow us to purchase equipment, keep printing our papers, and cover our annual website hosting costs.

    Donate to The UCSD Guardian
    $200
    $500
    Contributed
    Our Goal