Football Spreads to the South

This Technician article illustrates how many of the top players on NC State's 1936 football team were from the North.

As late as 1936, NC State continued to rely heavily on Northern players and coaches to strengthen their football team. Coach Heartley Anderson had come to the school from Notre Dame and the accompanying article illustrates how many of NC State’s most talented players were also from the North.  The article’s references to a player from Idaho known as “Cowboy” and “the home-state boys” who were competing for the quarterback position makes it clear that the public recognized where players were from and differentiated between local North Carolinians and everyone else. However, this particular article gives no indication of negative sentiment directed toward Northerners.

The fact that so many football players were from the North did make them relatively unique at North Carolina State. According to the 1936-1937 Agromeck yearbook, 233 of the 295 members of the senior class were from North Carolina. Another fourteen listed hometowns in other Southern states and forty-seven identified themselves as being from a Northern state such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Massachusetts. The remaining student was from New Mexico. Of the forty-seven Northerners, seventeen listed football as one of their activities. This means that Northerners were a small but still significant group at NC State – about sixteen percent of seniors identified hometowns outside of the South. It is also important to note that football played an important role in bringing this new group of students to NC State, as about a third of Northerners had been part of the football team.