Lansdale High School Football History
by: Time Neely

Lansdale High School resumed its football program in 1920. When the resumption was announced, the Lansdale Reporter article noted that this would be Lansdale’s first team in six years. But trying to find evidence, other than intriguing and mystifying photographs, was almost impossible.

The Lansdale papers were no help. They didn’t cover the team at all. But community papers elsewhere did, because many of their opponents were in their immediate area. Not every game in the pre-World War I era was against high school teams; some were played against prep school JV teams, and others were against local town, club or athletic association teams, which were still the most popular form of football in small-town America at the time. Almost all the teams in the future National Football League came from town teams, many of which had local sponsors. Exactly when Lansdale fielded its first high-school football team remains hidden. At the very least, the first two, and perhaps all three, of the early team photos on the web site are not actually LHS teams. Instead, they might have been teams of the Lansdale Athletic Association; in fact, the 1894 photo has the letters “L.A.A.” on the football. If any of the three pictures is of a football team representing Lansdale High School, the 1905 photo is the most likely candidate. So far, only one Lansdale High game for 1911 has been found: Saturday, Nov. 11 at Wissahickon Junior Athletic Association L 0-11

1894 L.A.A. Photo

1905 Lansdale Jr. High Football Team

Two things are interesting about this game. First, the newspaper account I read about this game mentioned that some of the players for the Wissahickon Jr. A.A. team also played for the Ambler High team. Second, you’ll note the score was 11-0. The year 1911 was the last year that touchdowns were worth only five points. In 1912, scoring was changed to make touchdowns worth six points.

In 1912, one of the Norristown papers published a complete Lansdale High School football schedule, which was as follows:

Tuesday, Oct. 1 Doylestown L 6-12
Tuesday, Oct. 8 at Collegeville
Tuesday, Oct. 15 at Conshohocken
Thursday, Oct. 24 at Doylestown
Tuesday, Oct. 29 at Norristown Reserves L 6-24
Thursday, Nov. 7 Conshohocken
Friday, Nov. 15 at Ambler W 20-3
Friday, Nov. 22 Ambler W 26-0
Wednesday, Nov. 26 at Abington

You can see, based on this schedule, how few area schools actually had football teams in 1912. Most scholastic football was taking place in prep schools, along the railroads, or closer to the city. Lower Merion, Radnor, Norristown, Cheltenham and Pottstown all had well-established scholastic football teams by this time, but few other schools within reasonable distance of Lansdale did. You’ll notice that one of the games was against Norristown’s second team; this also was not uncommon in this era. Lansdale was a very small school in this era, and with the lack of schools of similar size playing football, games against a larger school’s reserves (what we would call the JV today) were a way to get another opponent. Just as it would be folly today for North Penn to play Jenkintown, the same was true in the early 1910s; as much as possible, you played against schools your own size. You can also see that there was nothing yet chiseled in stone about playing on Friday or Saturday. Indeed, many games were played on Tuesdays, and sometimes, a team played twice in the same week. No rules prohibited this at the time. In many towns, the local adult team dominated Saturday play.

It’s indeed possible that some of the scheduled games never actually took place. In those days, a school would optimistically announce that it planned to field a football team, only to have injuries or a small turnout cause the team to end its season early or never start it at all. Also, it was not uncommon, even into the 1920s, for a school to accidentally schedule two games the same weekend, usually because of misunderstandings on one side or the other. Signed contracts were not always the rule. Sometimes, a school would cancel a game if it feared a rout.

Unfortunately, after 1912, the coverage of Lansdale High School football diminished significantly.

The only references to games in 1913 were:

Saturday, Sept. 27 National Farm School L 0-48
Friday, Oct. 24 at Ambler postponed, rain

The National Farm School was a prep school in Doylestown; today it is known as Delaware Valley College. This was a team way outside of Lansdale’s class at the time.

In 1914, the following games have emerged:

Saturday, Oct. 24 at Ambler Boys Club L 0-37
Saturday, Nov. 7 Ambler Boys Club L 3-7
Friday, Nov. 13 at Norristown Reserves L 6-13

Those two games were not against Ambler High School, as the 1912 and 1913 games were. It’s possible that an intentional downgrading of the schedule took place.

In the October 12, 1915 edition of the Norristown Register, buried in a “football roundup” article was this tidbit, which referred to Lansdale High: “Owing to scarcity of material there will be no football at the school this fall.” And that appears to have been the end of football at Lansdale until the arrival of Joseph “Dobbie” Weaver in 1920.