Reggie Brown Football Coaching Papers

Collection

Identifier: MSSP 1001

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

The bulk of the Reggie Brown Football Coaching Papers consist of a group of notebooks compiled by football coach Reginald W. P. "Reggie" Brown. Five notebooks (1904, 1905, 1905, 1911, and 1914) document Brown’s years as an assistant coach at Harvard University. One notebook (1928) comes from his stint as the head football coach at Boston University. The 1904 and 1905 notebooks chronicle the events of those Harvard seasons through clippings, practice notes, games notes, play diagrams, game commentary, and game charts. These notebooks give particular attention to the 1904 and 1905 Harvard-Yale games and the 1905 Harvard-Penn game. The 1911 and 1914 notebooks contain scouting reports on Harvard opponents. The 1928 notebook mostly contains administrative documents about many aspects of the Boston University football team, especially players personnel.

Formats include notebooks, newspapers, clippings, letters, photographs, and ephemera.

Dates

Creation: 1904 - 1997
Creation: Majority of material found within 1904 - 1939

Creator

Brown, Reggie (Reginald Woodman Plummer), 1876-1961 (Person)

Conditions Governing Access

There are no access restrictions on this collection. But researchers need permission from the Curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection to consult the original notebooks one through seven. Researchers can freely access the preservation copies of notebooks one through seven without special permisson.

Conditions Governing Use

Copyright status for collection materials is unknown. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.) beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owners. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user.

Biographical / Historical

Reginald Woodman Pummer “Reggie” Brown was born in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on March 13, 1876. After attending Newton High School, where he captained the football team, Brown enrolled at Harvard University in 1894. He played on the freshman football team and then the varsity football team, winning two varsity letters during his time in school. After graduating from Harvard in 1898, he worked as an assistant coach at his alma mater under several different head coaches from 1902 through 1916. In 1904, he was an assistant to Edgar Wrightington; in 1905, he assisted Bill Reid; and in 1911 and 1914 he assisted Percy Haughton. Brown was well-known for his scouting ability and his skill at football strategy. The 1905 Harvard football season is documented in Bill Reid’s republished diary, Big Time College Football at Harvard, edited by Ronald Smith (1994).

After working as an assistant coach at several other colleges, including Army and Brown University, Boston University hired Brown to be its head football coach in 1926. He remained at BU through the 1929 season. After Boston University, Brown was an assistant coach for other college and professional teams.

Off the field, he worked as an accountant for a variety of businesses, including serving as a Director of the Prudential Trust Company in Boston. In 1940, Brown was named the Massachusetts Director of physical activities for the National Defense program of the National Youth Administration. Reggie Brown died on January 31, 1961 in Newton, Massachusetts.