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  * Non-conference games

The Spring 1892 football season was the first year organized, intercollegiate football was played at NC State, then known as North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, or NC A&M for short. The first game, played in the Spring of 1892, was played just under three years after the college opened. Before we look into NC State's first football season, however, let's take a quick look at the history of the school up to that point.

NC A&M traces its roots to a group of forward-looking citizens of Raleigh who created a group known as the Watauga Club. The Watauga Club was formed in May of 1884 so those citizens could discuss in private how to best advance the state economically, with discussion often focusing on the need for a state industrial school. The club was initially somewhat secretive due to its discussion of what were in the postbellum South viewed as somewhat progressive subjects, leading some to theorize that it was a gambling club. Eventually, however, the club and its ideas, with the help of Watauga club-member Walter Hines Page's paper, the State Chronicle (and later Leonidas Polk's Progressive Farmer, which focused more on the need for an agricultural college), became recognized and accepted by the people of the state (Walser, pp. 7-9). On March 1st, 1887, the bill to create an agricultural college through the Morrill Land Grant Act passed, and the process of creating the college was officially started. Ground broke on August 22nd, 1888, and on October 3rd, 1889, the first 50 students were admitted to the college (Lockmiller, pp. 34, 42; Walser, p. 14).

According to C. D. Harris, in a 1910 summary of NC A&M football, A&M opened too late in the 1889 season to organize a formal football schedule; instead, "two teams were organized among the students, and a rough-and-tumble game was played every Saturday." The players' equipment was rudimentary, with uniforms being homemade and of differing colors, and shin guards made from soles of leather shoes (Harris, p. 174). This crude start of football was not exactly unique to A&M. In 1899, football as a sport was still in its infancy, especially in the South. Informal games of football were being played on UNC's campus as early as 1878 (Observer, February 18th, 1878, p. 2), and grew more organized with time. By 1883, UNC was organizing inter-class matches, and by 1888 students at Trinity (Duke), Wake Forest, and UNC had all organized teams. The first recorded intercollegiate football game in North Carolina was played in Raleigh on October 18th, 1888. Though a game had been scheduled for the Thanksgiving of 1887 between UNC and the Robert Bingham Academy, a boys' school based out of Asheville, NC, the game was eventually canceled. A central advertising point of the 1888 State Fair, the inaugural game was played by Wake Forest and the University of North Carolina. Played at the State Fair Grounds (which would later become home to NC A&M football), the match was played in the center of a horse racetrack and watched from baseball grandstands. UNC's team, composed only of sophomores due to a miscommunication in planning, lost to Wake Forest's full school's team in a match where each team had fifteen men on the field and the rules "had elements of both rugby and soccer games." Due to the unfamiliarity of each team with the rules, which were agreed upon just before the game started, the match was very sloppy, with the final score being 6-4 in favor of Wake Forest. Despite this, the game was reported to be "the most interesting feature of the whole fair" and an overall success with the crowd (Sumner, p. 265).

Despite A&M starting intra-school games of football early, it would take another two years before intercollegiate football formally began at the college. In his aforementioned history of NC A&M football, Harris claims that NC State had a team in 1890 that played numerous "prep" schools around the Raleigh area, in addition to Horner Military School, based out of Oxford, NC (Harris, p. 174). Thad Mumau, among others, also claims the Farmers had what he called a club team from 1890-91 (Go Wolfpack, p. 27). This team was less a formal team of A&M and more a group of college-aged men from Raleigh who played football together. Historian William Beezley describes this early team by writing that A&M's students "joined several young men from Raleigh in organizing an informal football team nominally representing the college" (Beezley, p. 2).

Harris goes on to say that the team lost all those games and even failed to score for the entirety of the season, save the game against Horner. The game, being played in Oxford, required A&M’s team to pay for the trip out of their own pockets. Despite the cost of travel, the match proved to be a shining moment in an otherwise bleak season, with A&M coming out victorious. The victory was celebrated with a "tremendous bonfire" where reportedly "all the members of the faculty" gave speeches "on that glorious victory." Harris also claims A&M played a number of "prep" schools in the 1891 season, winning all but two. He makes no specific mention of the game against Raleigh Male Academy, normally cited as NC State's first football game (Harris, p. 174). The only other reference to football that early at NC State I have found (aside from an A&M student breaking his collar bone in February of 1890) is in Touchdown Wolfpack, where the author describes "organized intramural contests" and "informal games with the local prep schools" (Douglas Herakovich, p. 2).

There are three different coaches who are often credited to have coached the first NC State football team in Spring 1892. Unfortunately, none of these men were credited in period papers as coaches, only in retrospective histories. And unfortunately, no history written by period sources specifically indicates a coach for the Spring of 1892, only the following seasons. Each has various cases of plausability to have led the team, but each also has detracting points, which I will outline below.

The coach most NC State publications claim instructed the first football team was Perrin Busbee. Busbee was the earliest person to be cited as the original A&M football coach, with Joel Whitaker writing in 1907 that "The first team was coached by Mr. Perrin Busbee." Seems pretty cut-and-dry, but I believe that rather than the school's incipient team, Whitaker was referring to the main group of players, as opposed to the second/scrub team, especially since the remainder of his sentence describes the 1893 football team, even after he described playing in the 1892 Spring game himself. The fact Whitaker often coached the back-ups during this time period likely contributed to his phrasing . Busbee was also an instructor at the Male Academy starting in September 1891, and was noted in several news reports as the captain of the R. M. A. team (Joel Whitaker, p. 154; The State Chronicle, September 15th, 1891, p. 8; The State Chronicle, March 13th, 1892, p. 4; The Evening Visitor, July 28th, 1892, p. 1). One factor in Busbee's favor as the first coach is that he was living in Raleigh at the time, unlike the others, who were in Chapel Hill and Petersburg, VA, respectivelty Finally, an article covering Busbee's affinity for sports noted that he "coached the teams of N. C. A. and M. College for many years," while claiming he coached UNC's 1892 football team; this is probably false, as Barrier Smith's highly thorough summary of UNC football, On Carolina's Gridiron, reported the Tar Heels had no coach in 1892, nor do any period newspapers. It's possible that the reporter got mixed up as to which team Busbee coached, or that the writer was confused by his leading of the UNC baseball team at that time (News and Observer, November 28th, 1915, p. 13)

The other primary candidate for the role of original NC State coach is Bart Gatling. The issue with Gatling is that he was still a student at UNC at the time, and was preparing to enter Harvard. Though he was born and raised in Raleigh and made periodic trips back to the city as a student, it seems unlikely he would have coached the teams, especially since he had at this time no known football experience (The Technician, September 19th, 1969, p. 8; The Hellenian, 1892). Perhaps most damningly is the fact that I found no reference to Gatling being the first A&M football coach until 1968; I believe these references were a misunderstanding based on the fact that the 1895 season -- the season for which Gatling coached -- was for a time the earliest season the school had official records on (Alumni News, Vol. 11 No. 6 (March 1939), p. 1; Technician, April 5th, 1968, p. 5). Further, he was not yet known to have had any formal association with football.

The third common candidate for the school's first head coach is W. C. Riddick. Riddick can probably be dismissed, as he was working as a civil engineer in Petersburg, Virginia for much of early 1892 (The Technician, September 29th, 1939, pp. 2-3; News and Observer, October 7th, 1892, p. 4; The Roanoke News, November 26th, 1891, p. 5; The State Chronicle, July 12th, 1892, p. 4). Claims that Riddick was the school's first head football coach are the oldest, behind those of Busbee; in 1912, a petition to get A&M Athletic Field renamed in his honor noted "He was the first coach an A. & M. team ever had." So while he did coach the 1892 team, he could not possibly have coached the Spring 1892 team. Further, while discussing the school's early football teams, he divested his own involvement, saying "For the first ten years our teams had no coach, no equipment, and not even a field on which to play," though he did admit that "I tried my hand at coaching for a year or two." Given that he did not lay claim to the 1892 Spring team when given the chance, I think it likely Riddick didn't coach them (N.C. State Alumni News, Vol. II No. 3 (November 1929), p. 52).

There is a way that two out of three of the above are true: Riddick could have been the first coach (for a Fall 1892 team that played no intercollegiate competition), and Perrin Busbee was the school's first intercollegiate coach for the 1893 team. Both of these are verifiably true facts, attested to in the local papers. What that means is that the 1892 Spring team was likely student-led, probably by captain C. B. Williams. Where he would have learned football is unclear -- possibly from Busbee -- but the preponderance of facts makes it seem as if NC State had no football coach in the Spring of 1892.

Though I have not been able to find much about other members of the first formal football team of NC State, the members were picked carefully. The issue was mainly logistical: A&M started as a military school, meaning all the students enrolled at the school had to do drill and training three times a week. On top of class work, potential jobs, and a limited amount of light in the day, the men had limited time to train. "Faculty [had] to excuse team members from drills during the season. For this reason the faculty carefully prescribed the number of players on a team, the length of the season, and regular attendance at practice" (Beezley, pp. 4-5).

The Spring 1892 game was the turning point of A&M football. The game was the first game recognized and played under the purview (however minimal) of the university. None of the earlier games had garnered any attention, and the Raleigh News and Observer didn't even assign a reporter to A&M's games until after the Raleigh Male Academy game (Beezley, p. 3). It also paved the way for a growing football program in the Fall of 1892.