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Football quiz time:
Who was the first football coach at the University of Illinois?
Who introduced football to Sterling, and was Sterling High School’s first football coach?
Who was the first sports journalist at the Sterling Evening Gazette?
If you guessed Scott Williams, Scott Williams and Scott Williams, you aced this history quiz.
It was 125 years ago this month that Williams, a University of Illinois alum, came to Sterling to take an $8-a-week journalism job at the Gazette.
The following year, Williams played in the first football game played in the City of Sterling. He became Sterling High School’s first football coach 3 years later.
Because Scott Williams is a common name, not many people today can place the connection between the first football coaches of the University of Illinois and Sterling High School.
Yes, it’s the same guy.
If some other journalism opening had been closer to his hometown of Bloomington, perhaps the early history of football in the Sauk Valley would have been a little different – and some other high school would have had a unique football origin connection.
Williams was born on Oct. 10, 1872, the son of a prominent judge in a city abundant with Illinois’ top legal authorities. He graduated from Normal High School in 1889; the school began a football program 5 years later.
After high school, Williams attended the Illinois State Normal School, now Illinois State University, to pursue “a literary course.” It was there when he discovered the game of football. He enjoyed it so much that he brought his newfound love of the game with him to the University of Illinois – which didn’t have a football team before 1890.
Williams enrolled at Illinois as a freshman and put out a notice to start a football team. It took a while, but he got 18 players together. Despite a short stature, Wiliams was the captain, quarterback, and coached when he wasn’t playing.
Illinois’ first game was Oct. 2, 1890, at Illinois Wesleyan, where it suffered a 16-0 loss. The next game, on Nov. 22, fared even worse; Illinois lost 62-0 at Purdue. However, Williams and his team salvaged the season on Nov. 30 with a 12-6 win against Wesleyan at the old Illinois Field – Memorial Stadium and Zuppke Field didn’t open until 1923.
One of the athletes that Williams persuaded to join was George Huff, who later would coach the Illini from 1895 to 1899, and serve as athletic director from 1901 to 1935. Huff Hall, Illinois’ former primary gymnasium, is named after him.
Illinois hired a football coach for 1891, and Williams switched to fullback and defensive end for a team that finished 5-1. The founder of the program was relegated to a substitute in 1892 for a team that went 7-4-1.
Williams graduated from Illinois in 1893 with an engineering degree. Years later, in a 1935 special edition of the Gazette, Williams wrote that he had no desire to study engineering, and did so because his father wanted him to.
“I settled the argument by telling him that I wanted to be a newspaper man,” Williams wrote. “To give him such a disappointment I believe was the hardest thing I ever did.”
Williams got lucky during the Panic of 1893 and found a job at the Bloomington Leader, but found no money to be made there. He searched across Illinois and landed in Sterling.
His initial stay was brief; after a little more than a month, he went back to stay with his family in Bloomington for a couple of months before coming back in July to become the Gazette’s Rock Falls editor. He became Sterling city editor the following year.
Williams brought with him to Sterling the sport he long loved, and once more rounded up a group of locals to form a football club.
On Oct. 19, 1895, Sterling took on the football club from Clinton, Iowa, at the old Athletic Park with about 250 people present. Each half was 25 minutes. Williams performed the opening kickoff, and he, along with Homer Burkholder and Judson Williams (no relation), did the bulk of the ballcarrying. However, Clinton scored once in the first half, two more times in the second half (four points per goal), and added a second-half field goal of two points for a 14-0 win.
It is assumed that Williams wrote about the game in the Oct. 25 Gazette, writing that “The Sterling boys feel highly elated over their splendid showing against a heavier team that has been playing foot-ball for four years.”
When Sterling opened a high school in 1898, Williams was called upon to coach the young group of kids. Their first opponent? Clinton. Williams coached for 2 years until the program could sustain itself on its own.
Football would go on to be the prime sport in Sterling, with both Sterling High and Newman (and its predecessors St. Mary and Community Catholic) amassing over 500 wins and having recent seasons where both the Golden Warriors and Comets went undefeated in the regular season.
Williams, meanwhile, sought another break from journalism. He briefly studied illustrating and pyrography. That didn’t last long, and he went back in the news business, serving as editor of the Sterling Standard and advertising manager back at the Gazette. During World War I, he served at Camp Grant, near Rockford, as a writer for the camp’s YMCA newspaper.
After the war, he returned for his fourth stint at the Gazette, serving in the capacity of “special writer” until his retirement in 1930.
Williams married into a prominent local family in 1897; his wife was the former Edith Thomas Galt of the Galt family that had a high reputation in early Sterling business. The couple had no children, and he died from complications of a stroke on March 19, 1946, at the age of 63.
Williams is buried in the oldest section of Riverside Cemetery in Sterling, his name and birth and death years engraved along with that of his wife; however, her year of death is not etched on the stone, and she likely may not be buried next to him. Their stone is near one of the many Galt family plots nearby. Nothing noting his connections to the University of Illinois or Sterling High School are visible.
Most who read Williams’ pieces in the Gazette also have passed. His legacy in the newspaper’s sports scene was passed to a young copy editor who would go on to spend about 50 years with the newspaper: Harry E.C. Kidd, who became locally famous for his “Sports by Heck” column.
Kidd has a youth football field in Sterling named after him.
Maybe one day Williams will be remembered in such a way.