FSU football benefits from link to campus circus group

Since 1947, Florida State University’s student circus organization and the Seminole varsity football team have practically grown up together.

The two programs were established after the Florida state legislature voted in 1947 to make the Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee coeducational. The purpose was to accommodate a large influx of World War II male veterans who were returning to civilian life and wanted to attend college under the GI Bill.

Hence, the academic campus in Tallahassee was transformed into Florida State University. Doak Sheridan Campbell, president of the women’s college since 1941, was asked to continue in that role at FSU. President Campbell was quick to endorse the formation of a men’s football team in 1947.

 

He tapped faculty member Ed Williamson to head the search for a football coach. Williamson played on the University of Florida varsity football team in the early 1930s, and he also coached high school football in northern Florida before joining the Navy in 1942 during World War II as an officer.

Following his discharge in 1946, Williamson was hired by the women’s college as a physical education professor and director of the intramural program.

The hiring of the FSU football coach grew frantic, though, when the top three candidates presented by Williamson were rejected by university administrators, supposedly on the grounds that “none held a doctorate degree.”

In desperation, President Campbell asked Williamson to take the coaching job. He reluctantly accepted, with the stipulation that he would be “one and done,” agreeing to a one-year deal. A brand-new FSU faculty member, Jack Haskin, a former high school physical education teacher from Illinois, was drafted as Williamson’s lone assistant.

 

A local Tallahassee historian said: “Williamson and Haskin assembled a program almost out of thin air. There were no players, no equipment, no schedule, no practice field…nothing.” But they pulled it together “in the space of three months.”

“The two coaches were responsible for every aspect of the program’s operation that first season. As ‘trainers,’ Haskin took up to three hours a day to tape half of the team’s 60 players. Williamson did the other half.”

The FSU team went winless in five games during the first season, but Haskin said he felt “the boys did very well that year.” And so did Dr. Howard Danford, the university’s first athletic director, who was brought in from Madison, Wis.

 

Dr. Danford’s perspective was that college athletics should be “purely amateur.” He stated emphatically: “The only justification for intercollegiate athletics in an educational institution is the contribution they make to the purposes of education.”

After the football season, Haskin was able to devote full attention to his original assignment at the university, and that was to create an extracurricular activity to bring together male and female students. His bright idea was to start the “FSU Flying High Circus” on campus. And it flew.

That endeavor proved highly successful and has brought international acclaim to the university over the years.

Looking back on that inaugural football season, Haskin used the FSU gridiron as a canvas for previewing circus routines.

“We weren’t much of a football team,” said Wyatt “Red” Parrish, who was the star running back at FSU from 1947-49, “but when we lined up in three rings for those pregame warm-ups, we were the best in the world.”

 

The late Steve Ellis, former sports editor at the Tallahassee Democrat, once wrote: “Halftime performances by the Flying High Circus stole the show at least twice during the 1949 (FSU football) season.”

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