Frank Uible ‘57 on the origins of weight training at Williams.

When I arrived at Williams in 1953, no Williams football players engaged in serious or even semi-serious weight training. I thought serious training might be a good idea. Up to that point I had merely fooled around at home with a set of weights during the summers. Consequently after the Williams football season in 1954 I joined a Williams hammer thrower who had expropriated the attic of the squash courts (unheated) and with him began hard training there with no direction from the College, using only our own weights and other equipment of our own and relying on such training information as we could find from the world at large. At that time very few football teams at the pro, college, high school or any other level instructed or otherwise encouraged their players to engage in weight training, serious, semi-serious or otherwise. For instance, in the summer of 1956 I became aware that the Cleveland Browns (then world champions) had no weight training program when one of the sons of the Head Coach of the Browns, came around to visit my brother and was intriqued with what I was doing with weights in my garage, and in the fall of 1961 when I arrived on the campus of the University of Michigan, its football team had no weight training program – just a few isolated players engaging in trial-and-error training. However, about 1955 or 1956 Louisian State University did establish a hard core weight training program for its players, which probably would largely hold up under today’s standards. In 1958 LSU was crowned the mythical national college football champion, and pursuant to that development the fact of their weight training program became well known. Thenceforth weight training for football players spread steadily. As I recall, Williams started a formal weight training program about the winter of 1959.

1) See here for the good that this weight training did from Frank.

2) I spent many hours using those weights. Fun memories! I suspect that I benched much less than Frank did . . .

3) When were the weights moved from that room? Where do students train with weights now? Does anyone have pictures of either that room or the current one?

[9] Comments
Print  •  Email