Good luck to the Lady Royals in their game this afternoon against Juniata! If they win, it will be the team’s 11th win for the season — and the 800th win of Coach Mike Strong’s career, which would make him the first coach in NCAA Division III women’s basketball history to reach that milestone.
Strong became head coach for the Lady Royals in 1979. Here’s a photo of Coach Strong with his team from the 1980 Windhover yearbook:
Here’s something we’ve been working on for a while as part of our ongoing digitization of materials from the University Archives: The University of Scranton Basketball Collection. We haven’t yet digitized the whole archival collection, but we thought we’d go ahead and make the part that *is* done available to all of you – especially with the University’s 125th Anniversary coming up!
So far, the digital Basketball Collection includes more than 600 photographs and documents, dating from 1917 through 1979, that relate to basketball at St. Thomas College and the University of Scranton. The collection includes team and player photographs, game programs, rosters, and selected newspaper clippings. Most of the material is from the 1920s-1950s, but we’ll be adding content from more recent years as we’re able to digitize it. Don’t forget, of course, that the original photographs and documents are available in the Library’s University Archives and can be viewed by appointment.
We hope that the collection will interest our alumni as well as our current students, faculty, staff, and friends. Please let us know at digitalcollections@scranton.edu if you have questions or suggestions for us — or if you recognize one of our unidentified photographs! If you like what you see, make sure you take a second to browse through our other digital collections.
If you’ve been in the DeNaples C-Store lately (or as it’s now officially known, the P.O.D. Market), you might have seen this “cheerful” photo behind the counter:
Front row: Tom O’Neill and Chris Zoeller. Back row: Herbert Lebovits, Joseph Molasky, and Jack McHale.
This photo from 1952 comes from the Weinberg Memorial Library’s University Archives, where it’s safely preserved for posterity in an acid-free folder. In 2009, we digitized the Archives’ whole set of football-related photographs and made it available online in our digital Football Collection. We recently just posted this photo to our Flickr account as part of a sample from the collection, to help users find us:
We here at the Library are proud to help our students get to know the University’s history. After all, according to one of our favorite archived University fight songs, “Today we’re Royals in the game, / Tomorrow we’re Royals in the world! We’re Royals, Royals, Royals!!”
The University of Scranton’s football team may no longer be around (in fact, it’s famous on campus for being “undefeated since 1960”), but at the Weinberg Memorial Library, UofS football is back in a big way. This week, the Library is proud to announce the University of Scranton Football Collection, a digitized version of our football archives.
The collection includes over a thousand photographs of University of Scranton (and St. Thomas College) football teams, players, coaches, and games – as well as photos of the cheerleaders and marching bands who cheered them on. The collection also features a set of football game programs. The programs, produced for each home game, have team rosters, statistics, and game analysis. Most of the materials come from the years 1900 through 1960, when the varsity football team was disbanded.
This collection isn’t just for UofS football fans, though. The game programs in particular are a rich resource for researchers interested in the history of Scranton and its surrounding area. The programs were sponsored by local businesses (like the Hotel Casey), so the booklets serve as miniature “time capsules” showing slices of Scranton life over time.
We invite all students, staff, alumni, and community members to browse and search the collection at www.scranton.edu/library/football. You may also want to take a look at our brief history of University of Scranton football.
P.S. While we have identified many of the photographs, some are still mysteries. If you recognize a player, please let us know!
Many thanks to librarian Kay Lopez, library systems specialist Jennifer Maher, and digital services assistant Kevin Pheasey, who all dedicated many hours of hard work to this project.
Congratulations to Mike Strong, coach of the University of Scranton’s women’s basketball team, on his 700th win! Coach Strong joined the “700 club” of the NCAA’s winningest coaches this Sunday when the Lady Royals beat Drew, 73-54.
In celebration of this milestone, I searched the University of Scranton Digital Yearbook Collection and found this photo of Coach Strong (on the left in the third row) and the Lady Royals, on p. 62 of the 1980 Windhover yearbook:
If you want to read more about Coach Strong’s 700th win, check out the University press release, or “The 700 Club,” an article by Scott Walsh that was in Monday’s Scranton Times-Tribune.
