PART II: COMPLETING ONE CENTURY, BEGINNING ANOTHER
The Wide World of Mercersburg Sports Less than a decade after its founding as a college-prep school, Mercersburg Academy had already produced its first Olympian. Walter Drumheller of the Class of 1897 represented the United States (and Mercersburg) at the 1900 Summer Olympics, which were just the second Olympic Games of the modern era. The original Olympics, of course, were first held in ancient Greece, and while Mercersburg’s athletic tradition certainly doesn’t go that far back, athletics have been an integral part of the life, history, and health of the school since the beginning.
34
Dr. William Mann Irvine was known as “the father of football at Franklin & Marshall College,” having played there and at his undergraduate alma mater of Princeton, and was committed to the ideal of the scholar-athlete as a model for his new school. “[Irvine] was a strong man and he felt that education was intended to develop strong men,” H.M.J. Klein wrote in 1936’s A Century of Education at Mercersburg. “He believed that the severe discipline of the athletic field would help to bring the result of what the school was meant to represent in
MERCERSBURG ACADEMY: 125 YEARS
its motto: ‘Hard Work, Fair Play, Clean Life.’” Irvine’s reputation as a coach, athlete, and aficionado of football was such that he once was pulled out of the stands at an Army-Navy game in Philadelphia to serve as a substitute official after one of the on-field officials fell ill. He was the first president of the Pennsylvania Intercollegiate Football Association. Irvine was also fond of reciting that within the first 10 years of Mercersburg Academy’s creation, the school was already fielding three football teams (of 60 boys total), with 40 track athletes, 25 basketball