Shelby Athletic Club

In this edition of the Pigskin Dispatch Early Pro Football teams we discuss the original team from Shelby Ohio, the Shelby Athletic Association and Clubs teams from the turn of the century.

Shelby, Ohio is a small industrial town nestled just north of Mansfield, Ohio, equal distant to the larger cities of Cleveland and Columbus. Near the beginning of the 20th-Century they like many Ohio Industrial areas found great fondness for the game of professional football. Shelby has some very interesting teams that played their hand in pro football history, and one of them often known as the Shelby Athletic Club, is the subject of our study of early professional football teams and franchises.

Shelby A. C. origins

To tell a complete story we need to go to the beginning. The foundations of the Shelby Athletic football team take us back to the end of the 19th-Century and a team of co-workers of the Shelby Tube Works mixed with some local high school players according to the ShelbyOhioHistory.com website. Football enterd the area at the high school level in 1894 and by 1896 football was moving to a whole new level in Shelby per the towns history website:

"Area adult men had evidently been watching with growing interest the local high school football team and organized a men's team. It was primarily composed of men who worked at the Shelby Steel Tube Company. When they formed their team they were known fittingly enough as the "Shelby Tube Works Football Team". They were the first Shelby "professional" football team."

A man by the name of Russell Johnston was the team captain and in 1899 the Tube Works squad hired C.A. Gleason as their Head Coach. The 1899 season for the club team consisted in just one game played. It was against a traveling Newark Atheltic Club team that was in the area. Newark has a tough foe as they blanked a local rival, the Akron Athletic Club 25-0. Shelby would have its hands full with this experienced eleven. They may have surprised even themselves as they went toe to toe with the more established foe and defeated Newark A.C. by the score of 8-5. This brought on a surge of interest by the community in this level of football.

By late 1899 funds were gathered as the community wanted a team representing the town not just the tube works. These monies built a sports complex in the area complete with a baseball diamond and a football field with a few wooden stands. The old Tube Works squad would now be known as the Shelby Athletic Association to bring town pride to the forefront and give a true rooting interest in the area to back pro football. The excitement surrounding the new field brought other teams to be created out of the woodwork like the Shelby Tigers,  Shelby Thunderbolts, The Shelby Second Team,  The Fairgrounds Team and others. Football was in a frenzy in the small Ohio Community! These teams started competing against one another and vying for the community support. The Shelby High School team was mixed in the fray as the other squads were trying to get their players to play for them too. To combat this the scholastic gridders played and defeated some of the adult level squads. The new enclosed complex allowed the Association to charge the meager fee of ten cents to every spectator, and the fans were more than happy to oblige and it helped fund the field and the team in part.

As for the Shelby A.A. in 1900 they kept their core players from 1899 but added more depth making them a roster almost exclusively employed by the Tube Works. The Athletic Association played 6 games in the 1900 season. They knocked off a teams from Ashland A.C., Ohio Wittenberg University, split a pair of games with Ohio Wesleyan University then tied the Akron Athletic Club on a snow covered field. A rematch a week later with Akron gave Shelby another victory an the claim to be the top Ohio A.C. team of 1900. The local fish wrap the Shelby Globe crowned the team as the Ohio State Champions as a result of their victories. 1901 saw the team once again have their formidable roster lay claim to a second consecutive Ohio State Title. A bit of controversy surrounded the team at the start of the 1901 season as the boys reorganzied and disassociated themselves with the Athletic Association. They would still rent the field but would play 1901 as an independent team, The Association soon dissolved and was replaced by a familiar name, the Shelby Athletic Club. The team that year though seemed to go my the mere name of Shelby.

Russell Johnston was still very much a part of the team and he spent quite a bit of effort in trying to get Ohio State University to play against his team. 1902 also saw Charles Gleason move to St Louis in to pursue an new job and Dr. Morton William Bland took over as the new coach. Frank Schiffer was named as the new team manager and he brought on some new players, including Charles Follis of nearby Wooster College who would later become the first black professional football player. Another notable new addition to the roster was that of a man named Branch Rickey, who would later make some sports history of his own. The team was changing and their new uniforms, blue in color would lead them to be called by a new name eventually, but the Shelby A.C. football still has a lot of history to talk about. I think we might save that chapter for next week's story on early football.