Everett Strupper - Football Career

Football Career

Strupper was a native of Columbus, Georgia and attended Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia before enrolling at Georgia Tech. Strupper played halfback for Georgia Tech football teams under head coach John Heisman from 1915 to 1917. Strupper was deaf, and because of his deafness, he called the signals instead of the team’s quarterback. Strupper was a small man, with his height being stated in varying accounts to be between five-feet seven inches and five-feet, ten inches. His coach John Heisman later wrote that Strupper was "but 5 feet 7 inches in height, weighed only 148 pounds stripped." He was sometimes known as "little Everett Strupper."

Georgia Tech never lost a game in which Strupper played, compiling three consecutive undefeated seasons from 1915 to 1917. During Strupper's three years playing for Georgia Tech, the team compiled a record of 24-0-2. Only two teams managed a tie – the University of Georgia in 1915 and Washington & Lee in 1916. In those 26 games, Georgia Tech outscored its opponents by a combined score of 1,135 to 61.

Georgia Tech coach John Heisman later described Strupper as follows:

”Everett Strupper was a small package of condensed lightning when you turned him loose in an open field with a ball you wanted delivered somewhere in the neighborhood of the enemy's goal line. He was small, but he was put together like a high-powered motor. His arms and legs did just what his mind told them to do, and, believe me, his mind worked faster than Ty Cobb's when he's running the bases. Dodging and twisting, stiff-arming and hipping, he'd run the gauntlet of men big enough, you'd think, to pick him up and spank him, and most of the time, too, he'd get away from them, try as hard as they would.”

Heisman recalled that, when Strupper first arrived from Riverside Military Academy, Heisman could not imagine Strupper playing on the football team: “Too light for the line, I didn't see how he could play in the backfield, because he wouldn't be able to get the signals. He could have played quarterback fine, but his enunciation wasn't clear enough for him to call the plays.” Heisman recalled how Strupper overcame the obstacle posed by his deafness: “He couldn't hear anything but a regular shout. But he could read your lips like a flash. No lad that ever stepped on a football field had keener eyes than Everett had. The enemy found this out the minute he began looking for openings through which to run the ball.” Strupper was selected as an all-Southern player in both 1915 and 1916.