2020 LYCOMING COLLEGE SPRING MAGAZINE

College’s first three 1,000-point scorers, including Vince Leta ’54, who played professional basketball in both Williamsport and Wilkes-Barre. The football team, during the same period, struggled to find its footing and with the outbreak of the Korean War, the team was disbanded because of a lack of male enrollment. In 1954, the College’s students voted for a $10 increase in their activities fee to revive the program, and David Busey, a member of the U.S. Navy during World War II and an assistant coach at the University of Illinois, was brought in as the College’s coach and director of athletics. Busey quickly built Lycoming into a powerful team. In just its third year, the Warriors ended a 25-game winning streak by Juniata College. He also began to expand the athletic department, hiring Budd Whitehill as Lycoming’s first wrestling coach in 1956. The department, as part of its association with the MAC, significantly expanded its offerings during the 1950s, with the tennis, swimming, soccer, and wrestling teams taking off. Whitehill, who embarked on a 37-year career in the athletic department, was joined by Nels Phillips, who coached tennis and soccer from 1959-78, and Dutch Burch, who coached basketball from 1962-94. All were hired with Busey at the helm. Whitehill brought the College’s first MAC title with the wrestling team in 1962 and in 1966, the basketball team won the MAC Northern Division under Burch. The tennis team also enjoyed a run of 10 straight winning seasons under Phillips from 1959-68, as did the swimming team under Mort Rauff. After the girls’ basketball teams at Dickinson Seminary faded from popularity in the late 1930s, women’s athletics began to make moves towards varsity status again in the late 1960s, with women’s tennis being the first to make the jump in 1971 and field hockey the following year. By the end of the 1970s, Lycoming also offered swimming (1972) and basketball (1978) to female athletes. At the end of the 1971 season, President Howard Huston showed up at the doorstep of Frank Girardi, a former Williamsport High School running back and a physical education teacher at the high school, and offered him the job as head football coach. Four years later, Girardi led the Warriors to a 6-2 finish. The team didn’t have another losing season for 29 years. Girardi, elevated to athletic director in 1984, ushered in one of the most successful eras in Lycoming athletics. His football teams reached national championship games in 1990 and 1997 and won 13 MAC titles. He won 257 games in 36 years as the head coach, earning induction into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2016. He also oversaw the expansion of athletics at the College, offering volleyball (1988), softball (1990), women’s soccer (1994), and men’s and women’s lacrosse (1997) during his time as director of athletics. By the time Girardi decided to retire at the end of the 2007 season, he had a hand in 27 of Lycoming’s 39 MAC titles. He also worked alongside Deb Holmes for 33 years, as Holmes built the women’s tennis team into a perennial conference contender, and hired Chris Ditzler, who is the only Lycoming coach to win more than 500 games, doing so as the softball (1993-08), volleyball (2000), and women’s basketball (1994-present) coach, as well as Roger Crebs, the only coach at the College to win 400 matches in one sport (wrestling). Girardi’s replacement as football coach, Mike Clark, won a MAC title in his first year with the program in 2008, leading the team to a three-win improvement. In 2012, Clark also took on the title of director of athletics and in the ensuing eight years, helped create six new full-time positions (head strength and conditioning coach, softball head coach, three assistant coaches, and an additional athletic trainer), and the College has greatly invested in part-time assistant coaches. Significant improvements including new scoreboards and artificial turf replacement have occurred at the Shangraw Athletic Complex, and he helped guide the department through an identity update with the release of the current athletic logos. Clark’s second coaching hire was men’s soccer coach Nate Gibboney, who led the men’s soccer team to its first conference title in 2013 and the team added two more in 2015 and 2017, embarking on an unprecedented run of success for the program. In 2018-19, three teams reached the MAC Commonwealth Championship game in men’s soccer, women’s basketball, and men’s lacrosse, the most teams to reach the conference finals since joining that side of the conference in 2006. q The men’s tennis team wins the College’s first Commonwealth Conference title. e Jason Mifsud ’13 becomes Lycoming’s first men’s tennis player to claim a MAC Individual Championship. r Under first-year head coach Nate Gibboney, the men’s soccer team upsets the nation’s No. 1 team Messiah and Elizabethtown in penalty kicks to earn the College’s first MAC Commonwealth title. The team goes on to repeat as champs in 2015 and 2017. Justin Walker ’14 (soccer) becomes Lycoming’s first NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship winner. Sam Dressler ’18 (football) and Brandon Conrad ’19 (wrestling) follow in his footsteps. u Frank Girardi is inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. o Abdullahi Abdi ’18, a men’s soccer player who lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for most of his childhood, and Brody Keefe ’20, a wrestler who overcame leukemia, are awarded the MAC Giant Steps Award. p For the first time since joining the MAC Commonwealth in 2008, three teams (men’s soccer, women’s basketball, men’s lacrosse) reach conference finals during the season. ’ 10 S 15 www.lycoming.edu