Assistant Coaching Career and Military Service
Prothro spent that fall serving as an assistant coach at Western Kentucky University, then entered the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant to fight in World War II, where he served for 39 months.
Upon leaving the service, Prothro served as an assistant coach at Vanderbilt University from 1946 to 1948, working as freshman coach during the first year. He then was brought along by the team's head coach, Henry Russell Sanders, when the latter was hired as head coach at UCLA. Over the next six years, Prothro used the single-wing formation as the team's backfield coach, helping the Bruins to an undefeated season and national championship in 1954.
Read more about this topic: Tommy Prothro
Famous quotes containing the words career, military and/or service:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)