Jim Thorpe

"Pop" Warner was Carlisle's athletic director when nineteen-year-old Jim Thorpe began his career. Under Warner's guidance, Thorpe played his best years in football and won two gold medals in track at the 1912 Olympics.

The legend goes that Thorpe was watching the varsity track team practice the high jump. None could clear the bar, set at 5'9". Thorpe asked if he could try it, and the boys agreed. He cleared the bar on the first jump. Bob Bernotas, in his book Jim Thorpe: Sac and Fox Athlete, wrote that the next day, Warner called Thorpe into his office and said, "Do you know what you have done?" Thorpe replied, "Nothing bad, I hope." "Bad," Warner growled, "Boy, you've just broken the school record!" Warner put Thorpe on the team and assigned senior athlete Albert Exendine to train him; in time Thorpe broke all of Exendine's records.

Glenn S. Warner was born April 5, 1871, in Springville, New York. He earned a law degree from Cornell University in 1894. When Warner began playing football at Cornell, his teammates nicknamed him "Pop" because, at age 25, he was older than they were. He practiced law only briefly before beginning a lifelong career as a coach.

Warner was one of the first to use the single wingback attack and invented the double wingback formation. He is credited with developing the screen pass, reverse play, mousetrap, unbalanced line, rolling and clipping blocks, and others.

Carlisle closed in 1914, and Warner took over at the University of Pittsburgh. After nine years he joined Stanford University and became a renowned contemporary of the famed Knute Rockne, coach at Notre Dame. He went to Temple University in 1933 and then retired to Palo Alto in 1939, with a coaching record of 312 wins, 104 losses, and 32 ties in forty years. He died on September 7, 1954, at age 83.