Oklahoma football: Who was John A. Harts and why is he important?
By Chip Rouse
The history of Oklahoma football is 12 years older than the state itself.
In the spirit and tradition of a true “Sooner,” the OU varsity football program got a head start on the state, playing its inaugural football game in December 1895.
Oklahoma derives its name from the Chocktaw Indian words okla and humma, which translates as “red people,” and officially became a state on Nov. 16, 1907, the 46th state admitted to the Union.
OU was founded as the state university, located in Norman, in December 1890, five years before the school’s first football game and 17 years before Oklahoma statehood.
That first Oklahoma football game was hardly memorable other than its distinction of being the debut of a program that would come to be recognized as one of college football’s greatest success stories.
John A. Harts was a student who crossed the state line from Winfield, Kansas, to go to school at the University of Oklahoma. He played football in Kansas and brought with him to Oklahoma a passion for the game. To his dismay, however, when he arrived at OU he found the idea of football to be an entirely foreign concept.
In her informative book, “The Sooner Story: The University of Oklahoma, 1890-2015,” Anne Barajas Harp, cited a quote by Harts’ capturing his surprise at what he found in Norman:
"“To my a consternation, I could find no one who had ever seen a football, let alone a football game.”"
Oklahoma’s first football squad barely had enough players to field a team.
Harts organized the university’s first team, composed mostly of non-students, including a local fireman, according to Harp, “who drove the prancing steeds that drew the Norman fire wagon.”
The university team’s first and only opponent in what constituted the 1995 season was a more experienced Oklahoma City town team, and the major disparity in skill and talent was apparent in the final outcome: 34-0 in favor of the visitors from OKC. The game was so lopsided that the OU team failed to record a first down.
Harts’ team had just one football to its name. Resources for so thin that when a substitute entered the game, the substitute had to change clothes with the player coming out of the game because the team only had a dozen uniforms.
Harts coached the team just that one game and, as such, is recorded in history as the first Oklahoma Sooner head coach. There have only been 21 since, the most recent being Lincoln Riley.
The team did not have a head coach the following year, in 1896, but won its only two games, defeating Norman High School twice.
After losing to the Oklahoma City town team in 1895, won eight consecutive game over four seasons, including a 16-0 victory over that same bunch out of Oklahoma City.
V. L. Parrington served as the Sooner football coach for four seasons, from 1897 to 1900, and is thought to be the first real head coach of the Oklahoma football program. His teams were a combined 9-2-1 in those four seasons.
In addition to taking over the football program, Parrington came to OU as an English professor, played football at Harvard and was believed to have more experience with football coming from the East coast. He also coached the Oklahoma baseball program. He would later win the Pulitzer Prize for History (in 1928 at the University of Washington).