Jim Moore ('66) has been working on a potential book on the history of Whitman athletics covering the first 95 years of the College's existence (1882-1977). The book ends in the scholastic year 1976-77 when football was dropped as a varsity sport. Mr. Moore intends to begin work this winter on volume II which will cover 1977-78 to the present. One of Moore's more notable accounts (click HERE for story) has been on Claude Norris, Whitman's first African-American football student-athlete who competed in the early 1920's.
Research for the book has utilized the Whitman archives (Whitman Pioneer, Whitman athletic department records, Whitman Alumnus magazine, Waiillatpu yearbooks, and Walla Walla newspapers, as well as some online sources including the NW conference and other relevant miscellaneous sources). Mr. Moore has done some interviewing, also. His purpose is to provide the College with a record of wins and losses in each sport, a record of administrative decisions that affected the athletic department, major athletic events of the College, and major participants. He has discovered that for certain sports (e.g., women's tennis, swimming, basketball, volleyball in the late '60s and early '70s; men's golf, wrestling, etc., in the '60s and '70s) records were not consistently kept and there were no reports of games/matches in the local newspapers. Thus, it is now difficult to reconstruct what happened.
In order to make a good faith effort to address the holes in the record, the athletic department will post in the "History" section of the department website the list of needed information. The hope is that interested alumni who participated in the sports in question will visit that posting and, where possible, send any available relevant information to Mr. Moore at jmoore914@comcast.net.
Northwest Conference History
