Monmouth College

The first football game was played in 1888 against Knox College which generated a gridiron rivalry that continues to this day as the sixth longest-running rivalry in the nation. Due to its larger participation numbers and popularity, football quickly supplanted baseball and track as the main athletic activity and eventually caused the elimination of baseball as a fall season sport. The first recorded intercollegiate baseball games at Monmouth were in the fall of 1868 and track and field squads were first recognized in the 1898 edition of the Ravelings yearbook. The turn of the century saw the introduction of basketball, a sport the 1901 annual recognized as “fast becoming one of the most popular American games.” These four major sports – football, basketball, track and baseball – have remained the most popular through the years at Monmouth and soon the interest in joining a league with other schools became necessary to expand the opportunities for all of the newly-formed sport teams.

NCAA and Conference Memberships

Since its formation in 1853 by persons of Scottish Presbyterian heritage, Monmouth College has maintained a solid relationship with its ecumenical roots. In the realm of athletics the college also sought to establish permanent national and conference affiliations to provide its student-athletes increased opportunities for competition and success through sports.

In order for its athletes to compete on the national level Monmouth has been a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) since the organization’s inception in 1910. The college has been an NCAA Division III (non-scholarship) member since the three-division system was adopted in August of 1973. Over the years Monmouth teams and individuals have advanced to NCAA national tournaments and participated in individual competition in a variety of sports.

On the regional level Monmouth’s athletic teams initially competed in the Illinois Intercollegiate Athletic Association until 1901 but the college’s first entry into actual conference competition came in 1910 with the formation of the “Athletic Conference of the Middle-West.” This league was comprised of Beloit, Lake Forest, Knox, Armour Tech and Monmouth and eventually changed its name in 1914 to the “Little 5 Conference” to accurately reflect its membership. Armour would drop out of the league in 1917 and was replaced by Northwestern College (later North Central of Naperville) before the conference was dissolved in 1920.

Monmouth also held brief affiliations with several other organizations in the early years of the century, groups which were conveniently connected by geography or schedule. The most notable of these leagues was the “Little 19 Conference,” which included almost all colleges and universities in the state of Illinois. In addition to Monmouth, “Little 19” members included a group of future Division III and NAIA schools (North Central, Carthage, Illinois College, Illinois Wesleyan, Knox, Augustana, Elmhurst, McKendree, Eureka, Wheaton), the precursors of the state university system (Southern Normal, Western Normal, Illinois Normal, Bradley, Eastern Teachers, Northern Normal) and two now-defunct schools (St. Viator and Shurtleff). In 1937 the state universities left the league, which gained additional small college members and survived until the World War II years as the “Illinois College Conference” or “Central Illinois Conference”. However, Monmouth’s long-term conference affiliation was stabilized in 1924 when it accepted a bid to join the fledgling Midwest Collegiate Athletic Conference, an association which would become the Midwest Conference.

The Creation of the Midwest Conference

The Midwest Collegiate Athletic Conference (MCAC) had its inception in the minds of a group of educators in several liberal arts colleges of the Middle West during the period immediately following World War I. On December 30, 1920, an informal discussion between representatives of six of these colleges was held at the University Club in Chicago. At this meeting, initial steps were taken that were to lead to the formation of a new athletic conference. The colleges represented at the preliminary gathering were Beloit, Carleton, Coe, DePauw, Knox and Wabash. 

The initial meeting having proven successful, a second gathering was planned for May 12, 1921, at Coe College and the first athletic contest of the new league was scheduled. This event, held in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on May 13, 1921, was an invitational track and field meet. Nine colleges were invited to be participants and six did take part in the historic competition B Beloit, Carleton, Coe, Cornell, Knox and Lawrence. Cornell claimed the honor of winning the meet and the first championship in the new association. DePauw and Wabash withdrew after the first meeting in Chicago and therefore were never members of the new conference. Thereafter, only colleges from the states of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin were considered eligible for membership. 

Seven colleges, including new member Hamline, sent representatives to a meeting in Chicago on December 19, 1921. These seven, the charter members of the conference, voted at this meeting to extend official membership to Millikin University, thus enlarging the association to eight colleges before regular athletic schedules had been arranged or dual contests played between any teams. The year 1922-1923 was to see the beginning of such competition in both football and basketball. 

The first annual meeting of the “Mid-West Collegiate Athletic Conference” (the hyphen and capital W in the title were later dropped) was held at Carleton College on May 19, 1922. The eight-college Midwest Conference was a going concern as the 1922-23 college year began, but changes in the alignment of its constituent colleges were in the near future. Ripon was officially granted membership in 1923 and Monmouth joined the association in 1924, bringing the total temporarily to ten colleges. 

However, Millikin withdrew from the group in 1924 without having participated fully in any of its activities and Hamline dropped out of the league in 1930. This move left Carleton as the only college in Minnesota, creating new and difficult problems involving schedules, travel expenses, and extra loss of class time for students on long trips for single games. Fortunately, in 1938, Grinnell College accepted an invitation to join the Midwest Conference effective with the opening of the 1939-40 school year. At that time, the association began functioning again as an organization of nine member colleges and had seemingly weathered the days of the depression.

The athletic program at Monmouth was also growing. In addition to the four major sports already in competition the college had added cross country (1927), tennis (1928), swimming (1927) and wrestling (1926) to its program. The 1930's saw the addition of golf (1934) to bring the total to nine sport teams, all of which were eligible to compete for Midwest Conference championship titles.

Growing Pains in the MCAC

Despite the progress of the college and the new league, the times were still unsettled. War was once more threatening on the global stage, and there were soon to be new and difficult internal questions regarding schedule, travel and equal opportunity amongst all conference member schools.   

For the first four football seasons of 1922-25 no team played more than four league opponents, therefore teams winning only one or two games and losing none several times tied for the “conference championship.” This manifestly absurd arrangement was temporarily improved in the late 1920's when some colleges played five or six league games. There followed a slumping period, from 1930 to 1935, during which no MCAC football team played more than four games with its conference opponents and two victories were again enough to back up a championship claim. 

Much the same situation existed in basketball. The earliest schedules included very uneven numbers of league games for the different colleges. The uncertainty surrounding championship titles was apparent and soon the conference arranged to award the basketball championship on a basis of eight conference games, with a maximum of twelve games with Midwest opponents permitted. This ratio was maintained with reasonable success in the 8-team league until the late 1930’s.

Just prior to 1940, however, a strong movement developed in the conference to require six football games and twelve basketball games for the championship race. After the 1940-41 season, Carleton, due to its geographical position as the lone Minnesota representative, withdrew temporarily from the Midwest Conference on the grounds that round-robin schedules placed them at too great a disadvantage because of frequent long trips and stayed out of the league for five years. The MCAC was once again reduced to eight members and now had to also face the terrible reality of another world war.

At this very time in history, the unprecedented conditions resulting from World War II disrupted every college campus and made necessary wide gaps in Midwest Conference sports schedules. Military actions during World War I had affected sports schedules between 1916 and 1918 but this period of national crisis was much more profound and widespread. Earlier differences were submerged, round-robin schedules were largely forgotten and conference championship tournaments were temporarily suspended. The main business of the nation was the personal and institutional support of the war effort.

Monmouth was no exception, losing a large majority of its male population to the military service in the early 1940's. Through the years of 1942-1946 several sports at Monmouth were canceled due to a shortage of participants. Due in large part to a temporary influx of servicemen in the U.S. Navy’s V-5 flight training programs the college was able to field athletic teams in basketball and track. However, the Navy outlawed its servicemen from football so no games were played in 1943 or 1944.

During the war, thousands of students from the nine Midwest colleges were in uniform, among them hundreds of athletes who played leading roles in all branches of the military service. In memory of the men who lost their lives, the 1945 conference minutes mentioned a “Midwest Collegiate Athletic Conference Honor Roll” containing names of 113 lettermen who were casualties in the war, including 9 graduates of Monmouth.

When the Midwest Conference resumed business in September 1946, Carleton was again a member. The conference was nine schools strong and committed itself to providing a standard format for championship status. Immediately after the war, only five football games were required for the league title due to the necessary time needed for all schools to recover from the wartime conditions. After 1948, no MCAC college played fewer than six conference games and a variety of formats, including complete eight- and ten-game schedules, have been played since then to determine the annual league champion. Basketball has also utilized a variety of championship formats, including round-robin schedules and divisional standings, to crown a conference champion.

For record purposes, it has been generally accepted that most team and individual records at Monmouth are recognized from the postwar “modern era” years of competition, beginning in 1946. At that time the college fielded eight active teams and would soon reinstate wrestling as a varsity sport.   

MCAC Membership Changes

Seeking to balance its constituency in both numbers and geography, the MCAC offered membership to a second Minnesota school, St. Olaf College, in 1952. St. Olaf accepted and the MCAC remained a stable conference of ten teams for over 20 years, enjoying healthy competition and vigorous rivalries between its member schools. The decades of the 1970’s and 1980’s brought unprecedented change, due in part to the emergence of other regional and state conferences. St. Olaf departed in 1974 but the Midwest Conference remained a ten-school league with the addition of Lake Forest in the same year. This alignment lasted only two years as the University of Chicago became the conference’s 11th member school in 1976.

The odd number resulted in scheduling difficulties and a variety of tournament formats in the respective sport schedules and, in an attempt to resolve some of the conflict, the conference adopted a two-division system for competition in major team sports in 1976. Schools were divided by location, first into East and West Divisions and later into the present North and South Divisions. The odd-number situation was temporarily relieved when Carleton withdrew from the league in 1982 and the conference added St. Norbert and Illinois College to bring its membership to an all-time high of 12 schools. Chicago left in 1987 and Carroll was added in 1992 to allow the conference to maintain two separate four- or five-team divisions through those years. The conference’s most recent change was caused by the dual defection of South Division members Coe and Cornell following the 1996-97 school year, a move which resulted in another round of tournament format changes and divisional realignment.

The Midwest Conference made it clear early in its formative years that it did not intend to be a one-sport organization. From the beginning it aimed at balance and a varied program, in which large numbers of students would be engaged the entire year in all the sports appropriate to conditions at its liberal arts colleges. The MCAC, however, had to base its first intercollegiate athletic schedules on sports far enough developed in the 1920’s to make possible sensible and satisfactory competition. This meant that, during its first decade, the Conference had to depend entirely on the momentum generated by the three major sports of football, basketball, and track.

As previously mentioned, intercollegiate competition sponsored by the conference opened with a track and field meet in May 1921 and a second meet was held the following year. In the fall of 1922, the first official Midwest Conference football schedule was launched and basketball competition followed immediately during the winter of 1922-23.

This major-sport pattern involving football, basketball and track was maintained without change until the fall of 1929 when the first Midwest Conference Cross Country Meet was run on a course at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. This breakthrough addition of a minor sport allowed the league to move toward its original goal of a broad overall athletic program.

Tennis and golf were the fifth and sixth intercollegiate sports officially recognized by the MCAC. The first Midwest Conference Tennis Tournament was held on May 30, 1931, at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A year later, on May 28, 1932, a Midwest Conference Golf Tournament was held at Galesburg, Illinois with Knox College serving as the host school. The advocates of two popular indoor winter sports, swimming and wrestling, soon won their case for recognition. Lawrence hosted the first Midwest Conference Swimming Meet in Appleton, Wisconsin, on March 7, 1936, and also served as the site for the initial Midwest Conference Wrestling Tournament two years later on March 5, 1938.

The addition of these sports now meant championship competition in eight sports and, aside from the setbacks and cancellations caused by World War II, the conference schedules remained unchanged for sixteen years. Undoubtedly the war conditions of the mid-1940’s delayed the elevation of baseball to a position as the ninth sponsored championship sport. After several unsuccessful attempts in earlier years, enough colleges arranged to field teams in 1954 to make a league title possible and in that year the conference voted to add baseball to its official program. Another sixteen years passed before the number of sponsored sports increased again. Soccer was added in 1971 and indoor track, a winter activity as distinguished from the parent outdoor spring sport, gained official championship status in 1977.

Monmouth added a soccer team to its intercollegiate program in 1972 and the college, which had been participating in informal indoor track and field meets, made indoor track an official varsity sport with the MCAC recognition in 1977. This increased Monmouth’s schedule to 11 sports at the time. Since then the college has dropped sponsorship of wrestling, and for a time dropped golf. Women’s golf was added in the fall of 1999 and the men’s program was reinstated in the spring of 2000.

Due to a lack of sponsorship among current member schools, wrestling was dropped by the Midwest Conference after the 1996-97 season. The current conference slate is composed of 10 championship sports, although several other non-championship sports, such as ice hockey, lacrosse, rugby and handball, are conducted on some of the Midwest Conference campuses.

A League For Women

All of the aforementioned sports and activities involved only competition for men. As athletic opportunities for women expanded in the late 1970’s from intramural recreation and the concept of the female athlete increased to a position of acceptance in society, the demand for varsity competition was heightened on the collegiate level. Women had actually been participating in a wide range of intramural athletic activities at the college as early as the 1900’s. Basketball, swimming, track, field hockey, rifle and baseball were all popular sports for women at Monmouth.

The expansion and addition of women’s sports required additional regulation, an idea the Midwest Conference recognized in the late 1970's. As one of the schools at the front of the women’s athletic movement within the conference Monmouth joined with several MCAC schools to create a new women’s league to meet the demand and provide female athletes with a separate voice in controlling their athletic business. The Midwest Athletic Conference for Women (MACW) was created in 1977 to conduct women’s championship competition and regulate sports among the existing conference’s member schools and was designed to be an equal yet independent governing body.

The MACW was originally composed of five teams – Monmouth, Knox, Coe, Cornell and Grinnell – and held its first tournament for volleyball in 1978. Illinois and Beloit were added to MACW competition in 1981 and the league’s remaining Wisconsin schools joined in 1984. This allowed for full conference participation and the formation of separate North and South Divisions. The 1978-79 athletic seasons featured Midwest Conference championship tournaments in volleyball, tennis, cross country, basketball, swimming, softball and outdoor track. Indoor track was added in 1984, soccer in 1986 and golf in 1996 to increase the women’s championship sports sponsorship to 10 sports.

The Present Midwest Conference

With issues of gender equity, administrative efficiency and national Title IX legislation becoming major concerns for college and university athletic programs nationwide, the athletic representatives of the two separate leagues pondered the idea of a joint athletic conference. After months of planning and discussion between faculty representatives, coaches, athletic directors and college administrators, a merger of the MCAC and MACW leagues was officially announced and the present Midwest Conference (MWC) was created in 1994. According to the new league’s mission statement, the intent of the union was “to preserve both groups’ traditions while enhancing administrative efficiency and fostering equity between men’s and women’s sports.” Furthermore the statement reads that the purpose of the Midwest Conference has always been to “maintain athletic activities on a plane in keeping with the dignity and high purpose of liberal education.”

At the present time 10 teams maintain membership in the MWC – Monmouth, Knox, Grinnell, Illinois College, Lake Forest, Lawrence, Carroll, Ripon, Beloit and St. Norbert. For some major team sports the first five schools comprise the MWC South Division and the latter five the MWC North Division. Several sports play round-robin or modified regular-season schedules to determine postseason tournament teams while others determine conference individual and team titles at a season-ending championship meet.

Athletic Facilities

The call for adequate facilities, both for practices and competition, dates back to the early days of intercollegiate athletics at Monmouth. The 1894 Ravelings contains the general student’s comment that “while we are indeed thankful for what has been done ... Monmouth College now needs a gymnasium. We do not agitate the building of a gymnasium simply because the students need it, but also because the College needs it.” Despite continued pleas for improvements to fields and buildings, the college hesitated and then suffered a devastating fire which destroyed Old Main, Monmouth’s primary academic building, in 1907. This unexpected loss put athletic improvements on hold for several years as the college constructed Wallace Hall and other residential structures for its growing student population.

Waid Gym played host to Fighting Scots basketball, swimming, wrestling and volleyball competition for almost 60 years and is now part of the Huff Athletic Center and houses locker rooms, a training room and health and fitness center.

In 1982 ground was broken on the south end of the Waid Gymnasium for another athletic building and a year later Arthur Glennie Gymnasium was opened. The first college contest in the new gym was actually a volleyball match, a three-game victory for Monmouth over Midwest Conference rival Grinnell in September 1983. The first men’s basketball game in Glennie Gymnasium also resulted in a Fighting Scot victory as Monmouth defeated Cornell 87-73 in their 1983-84 home opener. The Monmouth women made it a clean sweep of home victories, winning their inaugural basketball game in the new facility against Blackburn. Glennie Gym still serves as the present home court for men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball.

Another athletic facility ground breaking was held in 2003 for the $22 million Huff Athletic Center. The Huff Center, opening in the fall of 2003, will house an indoor track, swimming pool, tennis and basketball courts, batting cages and feature state-of-the-art electronics for track and field.

Football games have been contested on campus nearly as long as the sport has been played at the college, though early newspaper and yearbook stories refer to various off-campus field locations. As the campus grew and changed over the years, the actual playing field site was moved several times until the present field was finished. Bobby Woll Memorial Field, named in honor of one of the college’s greatest all-around athletes and coaches, was dedicated on October 18, 1980 and the first game played resulted in a 21-0 loss to Ripon in the 1981 home opener.

In 2008, the football stadium received the first phase of a two-phase makeover. Phase I included construction of new stadium seating and press box. Phase II saw the installation of artificial turf and permanent lighting. The new facility was completed and dedicated in the fall of 2009. The stadium itself was renamed “April Zorn Memorial Stadium” in memory of April Zorn Huff ’59 whose husband, Walter  S. Huff Jr. ’56 made the lead donation for construction of the $4.2 million facility. The actual field, featuring artificial turf, remains known as “Bobby Woll Memorial Field.”

In addition to football, the stadium is also home to the Fighting Scots men’s and women’s track and field teams. For many years both softball and baseball teams maintained separate diamonds for practices and spring games and the college’s soccer teams played their home matches on Woll Field. Renovations on the softball field were begun in 1998 and the new diamond saw its first competition the following spring season.

A generous donation to the athletic department in the late 1990’s allowed for the construction of a new baseball diamond and two soccer fields. Peacock Memorial Athletic Park, located one mile from the main campus on North 11th Street, saw its first intercollegiate action during the 1999-2000 athletic seasons.

Internal Control and Administration

The emergence of varsity athletics and the construction of suitable athletic facilities in the early years of the 20th century brought with it the necessity for control and regulation. In the fall of 1901 the college established its first “Athletic Board of Control”, which was composed of two students, two trustees and one faculty member. The board’s primary responsibility was to govern the individual sports, the coaches and managers, and the actions of their respective athletes. This group changed membership over the years in order to adequately operate the Athletic Department’s activity and remained in effect until the mid-1940’s.

During the early years of athletics at Monmouth the college witnessed tremendous turnover, not only among its student-athletes but also the coaches of the teams. Thirteen different men, usually doubling as football coach, were employed as athletic director between 1897 and 1924. The most notable of these was Clifford Bell (1905-07), who coached the college’s first championship football team, and Archie Hahn (1910-11), a four-time Olympic gold medalist sprinter from the University of Michigan. 

Upon entry into the Midwest Conference in 1924, Monmouth hired Herbert L. Hart as football coach and athletic director. This proved to be a very profitable move as Hart stayed at Monmouth for 14 years and was the department’s first long-term athletic director. His presence in the position gave stability to the athletic program and his teams were among the most talented and successful in the school’s history. The M-Club, Monmouth’s varsity letterwinner organization which was founded in 1921, grew and flourished during Hart=s years. In the 1930's the number of coaches also grew to reflect the increase in sport activity.

The department received a huge benefit when Bobby Woll joined the coaching staff near the end of Hart’s tenure. Woll, the only Monmouth football player to have his jersey retired, ended his playing days in 1934 and immediately began a 40-year coaching career at Monmouth. His relationship with the Athletic Department and involvement in the business of the college continued until his death in 1999. Under the direction of Woll and Glenn “Jelly” Robinson the Monmouth athletic program survived the lean years when most men were called into service during World War II. Woll held the position of athletic director for the entire decade of the 1940’s and he and Robinson were the mainstays of the Fighting Scot coaching staff during a difficult period in the college’s history.

Charles Larson led the department into the 1950’s and stayed as athletic director through 1962. The AD position was held by Henry Andrew (1965-71), Jack Steger (1971-76) and Woll for two more short stints before Terry Glasgow was promoted to that position in 1978. Glasgow, who was instrumental in solidifying the position of women’s sports at Monmouth, was originally hired as basketball and baseball coach in 1972 and immediately fielded championship contenders in both sports. His teams won numerous Midwest Conference titles and qualified several times for the NCAA Division III national tournament. He serves as athletic director until his retirement in the spring of 2008.

The “Fighting Scots” Nickname

The earliest athletic teams at the college did not carry any special names or loyal mascots. News reports and yearbook stories referred to “the Monmouth eleven,” “Monmouth nine” or simply described the athletic exploits by common adjectives, such as gridders, thinclads and roundballers. Shortly after Monmouth had entered Midwest Conference competition its students voted in 1928 to adopt the nickname “Bulldogs” for the athletic teams. However, generations of Monmouth athletes and fans have Harold Hermann to thank for changing the course of history.

Hermann, a Class of 1927 graduate who worked in the Alumni Relations and Sports Information offices after completing his degree, knew of the rich Scottish background of the church and alumni. Upon learning of the student vote on the college mascot, he immediately set out to campaign for a name change. Since Hermann handled the sports information duties he was perfectly positioned to refer to the college’s athletic teams as the “Fighting Scots”, a name he chose to describe all of the teams in print and press releases. The local newspaper media and press gradually picked up on the moniker and it wasn’t long before Monmouth officially adopted the Fighting Scots as its nickname.

Though several different versions of a Scotsman mascot have been used on college publications, logos, letterheads and signs throughout the years the “Fighting Scots” nickname has remained as the descriptive term for all Monmouth athletes and their teams.

Until Hermann chose to leave Monmouth in 1944, he continued his mission to revive the strong Scottish heritage of the college by selecting visible symbols worthy of the Fighting Scots. He chose the red and white Menzies Plaid as the first official tartan, replaced the green freshman beanies with tartan caps and brought the first bagpiper to campus from Chicago. The bagpiper concept caught on and eventually established the tradition which would become the Pipes and Drums corps which plays at graduation and other major college functions. For his years of devotion and service to Monmouth the school presented Hermann with its Distinguished Service Award in 1978.

Famous Monmouth Athletes

Unlike larger and more prominent universities which prepare their athletes for professional careers, the typical Division III small college does not cater to only the elite. Monmouth may not have the national reputation of other athletic programs but the college can claim a number of former student-athletes who have participated as Fighting Scots and gone on to some degree of fame and advanced competition in athletics in its long history.

Many of the more successful athletes of the college are memorialized in the M-Club Hall of Fame housed in the upper level of Glennie Gymnasium. The Hall of Fame was dedicated in October 1984 and included 10 of Monmouth’s greatest athletes in its charter induction class. Each fall a new group of former athletes and coaches are added to the Hall, which displays plaques and pictures of the honorees.

A member of the charter class and the first Monmouth athlete to achieve success in professional sports was football player Francis Louis “Jug” Earp (‘21), who starred for several years with the Green Bay Packers following his graduation. A dominant two-way lineman, Earp played one year with the Rock Island Independents and then 11 seasons with the Packers, including the championship years of 1929-1931. He retired from pro football in 1932 and was inducted into the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame in 1970.

Earp was followed into the NFL ranks by Keith Molesworth (‘28), who was a star receiver for the Scots in the late 1920’s and teamed with Warren Taylor to form one of the most feared passing combinations of the day. Molesworth played seven seasons (1931-37) at quarterback with the Chicago Bears and, after a short time in Triple-A baseball as a shortstop, he resumed his football career as a coach. Molesworth coached several professional teams, including the Baltimore Colts in 1953, and was the Colts’ personnel director from 1954 to 1966.

Football was not the only sport where MC athletes excelled. John Weatherly (‘33), another Hall of Fame charter member, was one of the best track athletes ever to wear the Scot uniform and held the school’s triple jump record from 1931 to 2006. Weatherly was an alternate for the 1932 United States Olympic team in the triple jump, won the event at the prestigious Drake Relays and captured an AAU national medal in 1931. He won four Midwest Conference sprint titles and was named an All-American in the triple jump. Hall of Famer Jack McIntosh (‘29), a six-time MCAC champion in the high jump and pole vault, won the 1930 Penn Relays high jump title.

Glenn “Jelly” Robinson (‘32) and Virgil Boucher (‘32) were Monmouth teammates who went on to long coaching careers. Robinson, one of the few athletes to letter in five different sports, returned to Monmouth as a coach from 1941 to 1956, while Boucher coached high school football in Illinois for over 40 years, earning induction into the IHSA Hall of Fame. Bobby Woll (‘34) earned UPI All-State honors in football in 1932 and 1933 before beginning his coaching career at the college and remains the only Fighting Scot player to have his football jersey retired. Robinson and Woll were also charter members of the Hall of Fame.

Jack Ozburn (‘33) was an AP All-Star basketball selection before having a successful AAU semipro career after his graduation. LeRoy King (‘45) played two full basketball seasons at Monmouth before using his final year of eligibility earning Honorable Mention Big 10 honors at Northwestern. King then went on to a brief professional career with the Rochester Royals, one of the original charter teams of the NBA. Robert “Tab” Talkin (‘49) left Monmouth during World War II service and earned All-American honors at Illinois State University.

Prior to the NCAA divisional system, several other Monmouth athletes earned “Little All-American” honors for their achievements on the playing fields. James Vipond (‘40) and Ray Brooks (‘53), two of the original 10 Hall inductees, were All-American football selections at guard and running back, respectively. John Bingaman (‘63), one of the MC’s best two-way players, earned All-American mention at center and linebacker.