Forgotten Texas Longhorn pipeline school: San Antonio Academy
This San Antonio prep school was a key talent pipeline in UT's early football history
College football programs often have longstanding relationships with particular talent pipelines, high schools that have sent several student-athletes to that college within a relatively short amount of time.
The University of Texas has had its share of pipeline schools from which it has drawn football talent in the 132-year history of its football program. In all, there are 36 high schools or prep schools which have had ten or more UT football lettermen among their ex-students, and at least 83 other schools can claim five or more Longhorns who once walked their hallways.
Some of those schools are modern-day powerhouses such as Austin Westlake, Brenham, DeSoto, Galena Park North Shore, and Tyler High School, and most UT fans could name multiple Longhorns who came from those schools. But there are also a number of pipeline schools from past eras whose contributions to the Longhorn football program’s success are largely forgotten, either because the school in question no longer exists, has not been a football power in a very long time, or (as is the case of this post’s subject) has not served high school students for many, many years.
This post, the first in a recurring series on “Forgotten Texas Longhorn pipeline schools”, will focus on a notable San Antonio prep school called the San Antonio Academy. This school has not served high school students for nearly a century, but it was one of the most prominent pipeline schools in the first three decades of the UT football program’s existence.
In fact, even today, 105 years after the last San Antonio Academy product to win a varsity letter with the Longhorn football program, no other school in San Antonio can claim more UT football lettermen among its former students.1
The school now known as the San Antonio Academy of Texas was founded in 1886. (A prior institution known as the San Antonio Academy existed at least as early as 1854, though it appears to be unrelated to the one that is the subject of this post.) Its first principal was Dr. W.B. Seeley, who was hired away from the Newark Academy in Newark, New Jersey to open the new school. For several years the school was variously referred to as the San Antonio Academy, the Seeley School, Seeley Academy, or as “Professor Seeley’s academy”. It was common at that time for private schools to be named colloquially — and sometimes even officially — for their founding principal. The Academy’s website states that it was founded as the Seeley School and that its name was changed to the San Antonio Academy in 18942, though an 1886 article in the San Antonio Daily Light reporting on the school’s founding stated that its name was intended from the beginning to be the San Antonio Academy.3
Originally it was designed as a school to prepare young men for college, but after operating as a preparatory school for twenty years it expanded its lower school in 1906 to educate students in grades two through seven.
In 1926, all of the San Antonio Academy’s upper school students (those in grades eight through eleven) were transferred to the nearby West Texas Military Academy, and its upper school was merged with the West Texas Military Academy to form the Texas Military Institute. This school still operates today and has been known as TMI Episcopal since 2017. The San Antonio Academy — if I’m reading its history correctly — has not served students above middle school since 1926. Today the San Antonio Academy educates boys from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. The Academy’s student body has mostly been comprised of boys from San Antonio families, but it also ran a boarding program from the late 1880s until 1998 which served boys from various other parts of the state.
Football was played by students of the San Antonio Academy at least as early as 1889. The issue of the Daily Light published on December 13 of that year stated that teams from the San Antonio Academy and St. Mary’s College (another all-male prep school and college which operated in downtown San Antonio at the time) had played a football game the previous day, with the St. Mary’s team emerging the victor.4 No other details were given, so we can’t be sure if this was a game of gridiron football or a similar game played by rugby rules.
The University of Texas fielded its first varsity football team in 1893, and between that year and 1920 there were no fewer than 14 now-recognized UT football lettermen who had attended the San Antonio Academy. By the time Academy graduate Louis Jordan served as captain of the 1914 Texas Longhorn football team, the Academy could have claimed more former students among UT’s lettermen than any school except for Austin High School. Even as late as 1926 when the Academy stopped serving upper school students, only Austin High and Houston High School could claim a connection with more Longhorn football lettermen.
Below are the Longhorn lettermen who are known to have attended the San Antonio Academy before enrolling at UT (years in parentheses are the seasons for which they are recognized football lettermen):5
John Frost Maverick (1894-95)
Clarence Waldman King (1896)
Lewis Maverick (1896)
Walter Richard Schreiner (1896-1900)
Carl Groos (1897-98)
Sempronius “Semp” Russ (1898-1900)
Raymond Keller (1899)
Victor Keller (1901)
George Vance Maverick (1902)
Seth Searcy (1903)
Frost Woodhull (1904, 1910-12)
Leon Goodman (1908)
Louis Jordan (1911-14)
Joe Ferguson Ellis (1920)
Below I will share the stories — some much more brief than others — of these San Antonio Academy students who went on to play football at Texas. This group includes three Longhorn team captains, UT’s first Olympic athlete, the Longhorn football program’s first All-American, a three-sport athlete who signed a contract with a professional baseball team, and four players who were considered all-time Longhorn greats well into the 1920s. It will proceed mostly in chronological order from earliest to latest, with some groupings of brothers or other relatives who attended years apart.
John Frost Maverick (1894-95)
Lewis Maverick (1896)
George Vance Maverick (1902)
Three members of San Antonio’s prominent Maverick family played football for the University of Texas during the program’s first decade. They were first cousins to one another, and were all grandsons of San Antonio pioneer Samuel Augustus Maverick, who moved from Alabama to Texas in 1835.
Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870) was a major landowner in and around San Antonio and served as that city’s mayor on a pair of occasions. He was a veteran of the Texas Revolution and was present at the Alamo after the Mexican army had begun its siege of that mission in March of 1836, but he was sent away as a delegate to the Convention of 1836 (which drafted and signed the Texas Declaration of Independence) and thus was not among the Texians killed in the final days of that iconic battle.
Samuel Maverick was also indirectly responsible for the name Maverick becoming a descriptive noun. He is said to have acquired around 400 head of cattle in 1845 from someone who owed him a debt, and because Maverick refused to brand the livestock that he owned many from that herd ended up roaming away or being claimed by other ranchers. Thus “maverick” came to be defined as “an unbranded range animal”, and later as “an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party”. The term “maverick” has been used frequently in the political realm and as a nickname for athletic teams. Along with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and a number of minor league baseball and hockey teams there are no less than ten colleges and forty-five high schools whose mascot is the Maverick.
Samuel Maverick did not live long enough to witness the opening of the San Antonio Academy, but many of his descendants have attended the Academy during its nearly 140 years of operation. A 2017 issue of Bond of Brothers, the Academy’s official magazine, named members of the Maverick family who had graduated in classes from ten different decades!6
John Frost Maverick was born in 1874 and was the scion of two prominent San Antonio families. His father, Samuel Augustus Maverick Jr., was the eldest son of the aforementioned Samuel Maverick. His mother, the former Sarah Frost, was a sister of Thomas Clayborne Frost, the founder of the San Antonio-based Frost Bank.
At some point an urban legend (or were they rural legends back then?) took hold that Sarah Frost “Sallie” Maverick was the first white woman born in Texas, but she was actually born in 1851, 15 years after Texas gained its independence from Mexico and five years after Texas was admitted to the union as the 28th state.7 And census records consistently named Alabama as her birthplace.
John Maverick was one of the earliest students at the San Antonio Academy, and his father Samuel Maverick Jr. was a member of the school’s original board of trustees when it was founded in 1886. He graduated from the Academy in 1888, the year he turned 14. He first enrolled at the University of Texas in 1893 at age 19, and the University’s catalogue for 1893-94 listed him as a freshman engineering student. In the fall of 1893 he was a member of UT’s first varsity football team, though he was not a starter in any of the four games played in that inaugural season and is not considered a letterman for that year.
He was a regular at the tackle and fullback positions in the following two seasons and is a recognized letterman for the 1894 and 1895 seasons. In his post-college career he was a postal worker in Houston and Galveston.
Lewis Maverick was born in 1877 and was the son of William Harvey Maverick, another son of the pioneer Samuel Augustus Maverick, Sr. Lewis received his early education at schools in Germany and Switzerland before attending the San Antonio Academy, from which he graduated in 1896.8 He enrolled at the University of Texas that same year, and was an academic student for two years and then a law student for another two years. While at UT he played quarterback on the 1896 football team, a full decade before the forward pass was legalized. News reports from UT’s 1897 football season make a few references to a quarterback named Maverick, but it is unclear how much he played that year.
He served in the Army for a number of years after his college days, and was living in California at the time of his death following a heart attack in 1939. His son Lewis Maverick Jr. was married to a niece of Lou Henry Hoover, the wife of President Herbert Hoover.
It is unclear if Lewis Maverick was considered a football letterman at UT during his lifetime. The 1897 Cactus yearbook did not mention him as one of the members of the 1896 football team, though contemporary news accounts state that he started in at least one game that season. A 1916 pamphlet published by the UT Athletic Council did not list him among the school’s known athletic lettermen.
Lewis Maverick was also not identified as a letterman by Austin Statesman sportswriter and Longhorn football historian Lou Maysel in his 1970 book Here Come the Texas Longhorns, which included a list of UT’s all-time lettermen through the 1969 season in its final pages.
But Lewis Maverick has been included in the all-time lettermen lists published in Longhorn football media guides going back over 50 years, and he undoubtedly played for the team in any case. My own speculation is that the first compilations of football “lettermen” were largely based on which names were mentioned in the annual Cactus yearbooks during the 1890s before it became tradition for varsity letters to be awarded at a post-season banquet after the end of a season. This is how William Henry Richardson, the starting right guard in UT’s very first football game in 1893, was not awarded his football letter until several decades afterward because an injury or illness prevented him from being present when the 1893 team photo was taken.
George Vance Maverick was born in 1880 and was the son of George Madison Maverick, the third oldest of Samuel Augustus Maverick’s children who survived childhood. He graduated from the San Antonio Academy in 1899 and began his college career at Princeton that same year. He left Princeton a year later, and attended the University of Texas as a law student from 1902 to 1904. While a UT student he played fullback on the 1902 varsity football team and is a recognized letterman for that year.
In addition to his above-named cousins, George Vance Maverick had two other family connections with the UT football program. His first wife was the former Laura Blocker, a fellow San Antonian whose older brother William Bartlett Blocker was a letterman on the Texas football teams of 1904 and 1905. George V. Maverick was also an uncle to George Maverick Green, who played tackle for the Longhorns in 1919 and 1920 after beginning his college career at Rice.9
Clarence Waldman King (1896)
Clarence King was born in 1876 and was a native of Wharton, Texas. His father was a lawyer, and the King family moved from Wharton to San Antonio when Clarence was still at a young age. He attended the San Antonio Academy, then was a student at the University of Texas from 1895 to 1899. He played fullback on the 1896 UT football team and is a recognized letterman for that year. In his professional life he was an architect in Shreveport, Louisiana for many years.
Walter Richard Schreiner (1896-1900)
Walter Schreiner was born on New Year’s Eve in 1877 to a French father and a German mother, and was a native of Kerrville, Texas. It was in that city that his father Charles Schreiner founded the Schreiner Institute in 1923. The Schreiner Institute operated as a prep school and junior college for many years before becoming a four-year college in 1981, and it became Schreiner University in 2001.
Walter Schreiner graduated from the San Antonio Academy (likely as a boarding student) before enrolling at the University of Texas in 1896.10 He joined the UT football team and developed into a standout at the end position. He served as team captain in 1900, his last season with the team. Rules limiting student-athletes to three or four years of eligibility had not been established yet, and Schreiner became the UT football program’s first five-year letterman, and he was likely the only one the program ever had until the post-COVID era.11
Within his lifetime, Walter Schreiner was considered an all-time UT football great. In 1925, the University’s longtime dean of engineering T.U. Taylor, who had been a big fan of its football team almost from the very beginning, named his all-time Texas football first and second teams. He named Schreiner as the right end on his second team.12 This will not be the last time this post mentions Professor Taylor’s all-time UT football team.
Schreiner was inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor in 1973. His nephew Whitfield Scott Schreiner was a member of the UT Board of Regents from 1942 to 1947.
Carl Groos (1897-98)
Carl Groos was a San Antonio native who was born in 1879 and descended from German immigrants on both sides of his family. He attended the San Antonio Academy and played on its football team. He played right tackle on the “Seeley” football team in 1895, a squad that had at least three other future UT football lettermen in its lineup. Groos was an academic student at UT from 1897 to 1899 and played on the varsity football team. He was a substitute on the 1897 team and the regular fullback on the 1898 squad, and program records credit him as a letterman for both seasons.
Sempronius “Semp” Russ (1898-1900)
Semp Russ was born in Louisiana in 1878 and moved with his family to San Antonio at age 12 after the death of his father. For his preparatory education he attended the San Antonio Academy and another day school in the city, the Magruder’s School for Boys. He first played football while at the Academy, and many years later he recalled playing against the football team from the West Texas Military Academy in San Antonio, which had future Army general Douglas MacArthur playing quarterback.13
He began his college career at Tulane, but transferred to the University of Texas a year or so later. While at UT he was a member of the varsity football team from 1898 to 1900, playing the end position initially but becoming a star at quarterback over his last two seasons. Though the forward pass was not legalized until six years later in 1906 and the quarterback position did not involve passing the football during Russ’s time, it was still a key position in the offensive lineup and was responsible for calling the offensive signals. For many years Russ was considered the best to play that position at UT, and certainly the best from the pre-forward pass era. Engineering dean T.U. Taylor named Semp Russ as the first team quarterback of his personal all-time UT football team in 1925.
Even into the 1930s, Semp Russ’s play at quarterback was remembered by enough UT football “old-timers” that when Austin American sports writer Weldon Hart was asked in the fall of 1935 to compile an all-time UT football team for publication in the game program for that year’s Thanksgiving Day matchup with Texas A&M, Hart named Russ as UT’s second team all-time quarterback after consulting with people who had watched the team as far back as the 1890s.14
Russ was even better at tennis than football. He won several state singles and doubles championships in tennis from his early 20s through his late 30s, and in 1904 he competed in men’s tennis at the Olympic games in St. Louis, Missouri, becoming the first former University of Texas athlete to compete in the Olympics. He was inducted into the Texas Tennis Hall of Fame in 2007. (I wrote more about Russ and his athletic career in a 2021 post at Burnt Orange Nation on “UT’s forgotten Olympians”.)
Russ was a longtime attorney, businessman, and philanthropist in his hometown of San Antonio, staying active well into his 90s. He was inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor in 1969, when he was 91 years old and among the last surviving UT student-athletes from the 19th century. He died in 1978, only five weeks shy of his 100th birthday.
Raymond Keller (1899)
Victor Keller (1901)
Brothers Raymond (1876-1953) and Victor Keller (1883-1949) were both born in their father’s home state of Illinois, and moved with their family to San Antonio in 1885. They both attended the San Antonio Academy before enrolling at the University of Texas. Raymond played halfback on the UT football team and is a recognized letterman for the 1899 season. Victor played center and won a letter with the 1901 team.
Their father was a lawyer, and both Raymond and Victor would follow him into the legal profession. Raymond practiced law until retiring in his early 70s, and Victor held office as the City Attorney for San Antonio during the early 1940s.
Seth Searcy (1903)
Seth Shepard Searcy was born in Brenham, Texas in 1881 and lived for all of his youth in that city. He was named after his mother’s older brother Seth Shepard (1847-1917), a lawyer and Texas native who was one of the earliest members of the University of Texas Board of Regents (he served as a Regent from 1883 to 1890), and later was a judge for 23 years on the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia after being nominated to that court by President Grover Cleveland in 1893.15 Searcy’s father, William Searcy (1855-1941), was also a lawyer, and according to his obituary he was a charter member of the Texas Bar Association and served as its president for the 1912-1913 term.16
Seth Searcy attended the San Antonio Academy as a boarding student before enrolling at the University of Texas, where he was a law student and played quarterback on the football team. He passed the Texas bar exam in the summer of 1903, but returned to UT that fall to complete his legal studies and won his only letter with the varsity football team that year. The Cactus yearbook’s roster for the 1903 football team listed Searcy’s size as 4’11.5” and 140 pounds, which would have made him possibly the smallest man to ever suit up for the UT football team if those numbers were accurate.17 That height figure was either inaccurate or Searcy had a late growth spurt after his 22nd birthday. When he registered for the military draft nearly four decades later at age 60, the height and weight listed on his draft card was 5’6” and 160 pounds.
He graduated from UT with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1904 and went on to a long legal career. His younger sister Katherine Searcy was also a UT alum and worked at the University of Texas library for 45 years before retiring in 1957.18
Frost Woodhull (1904, 1910-12)
Thomas Frost Woodhull was a San Antonio native whose grandfather, Thomas Clayborne Frost, was the founder of today’s Frost Bank.19 Woodhull was a first cousin once removed to the aforementioned letterman John Frost Maverick. Throughout his life he was commonly known by his middle name, Frost.
Woodhull attended the San Antonio Academy and graduated in its class of 1904, the commencement for which was held a week before his 17th birthday. He was initially reported to be bound for Princeton to begin his collegiate education, but he instead enrolled at the University of Texas that fall and joined the UT football team for its early workouts in September.20
Frost Woodhull played the right end position for the 1904 UT football team. According to the 1905 Cactus yearbook, he was among the team’s smallest players, standing just 5’8.5” and weighing in at 135 pounds, and at 17 years of age he was easily the team’s youngest player and a full nine years younger than the team’s oldest player: guard Lucian Parrish. (I wrote about Parrish in a September post on the “old men” of Texas Longhorn football.)
Woodhull played in five of the team’s seven games in the 1904 season and was awarded a varsity letter for that year.
As you might suspect from reading the years that he lettered at Texas, Woodhull’s collegiate career was an unorthodox one. He was reported to be returning to UT in the fall of 1905, but at some point he left the University and traveled east to attend the Phillips Exeter Academy, a prestigious boarding and prep school in New Hampshire that was founded in 1781 and remains in operation today. Woodhull would graduate from Exeter as a member of its class of 1907. He played football during at least his final year there, but was a member of the team’s backup unit of 1906, the “second eleven”, and not the first team. According to the 1907 Pean yearbook he was voted “handsomest” and “best gymnast” in his Exeter class.
Notably, Exeter had admitted black students for many years by the time Woodhull attended, though they did not make up a significant portion of the student body. One of Woodhull’s contemporaries at Exeter was Julian Paris Rodgers, an Alabama native who graduated from Exeter in 1908, went on to graduate from the University of Michigan’s law school in 1915, and was said in his obituary to be “the first Negro to take a written bar examination in Alabama”.21 Whether or not Woodhull and Rodgers were acquainted is unknown, but Woodhull’s attendance at Exeter meant that he had at least one black classmate at a time when most Texas public schools were still five or six decades away from desegregating.
He eventually returned to UT in 1910, by which point he was 23 years old and about five years removed from his last day as a student there. He re-joined the Longhorn football team and played the end position for three seasons from 1910 to 1912. As a senior in 1912 he was voted captain of the Longhorn football team, and in that season the team finished with a 7-1 record. Their only loss came against Oklahoma in what was the first time the two schools played against each other at a neutral site in Dallas rather than at one of their respective home fields.
Frost Woodhull was considered a standout at the end position and one of the best players the school had produced during its football program’s first few decades. When engineering dean T.U. Taylor named his all-time Texas football team in 1925, he put Frost Woodhull as the left end on his second team.
Woodhull graduated from Texas with a Bachelor of Laws degree and was a lawyer in his hometown of San Antonio for several years, and in the 1930s he was elected to two terms as Bexar County Judge. Aside from his familial relationship with 1894-95 letterman John Frost Maverick, Woodhull had a connection with another past UT football figure through his second wife, the former Holland Sharpe. Holland Sharpe Woodhull was a niece of Charles Holland Leavell, who played halfback and fullback on the Texas varsity football team from 1896 to 1898.
Leon Goodman (1908)
Leon Stanley Goodman was born in 1886 in San Antonio and was a lifelong resident of that city. He was a descendant of German immigrants on both sides of his family. His father Lewis Goodman was a native German of Jewish ancestry who moved to California while in his teens, and after marrying and having four children while living in San Francisco he moved his growing family to San Antonio in 1885, only a year or so before Leon’s birth. Lewis Goodman worked as a grocer in San Antonio for the rest of his life, and Leon would eventually follow his father into that profession.
Leon Goodman attended the San Antonio Academy and likely graduated in 1904 or 1905. The 1905-1906 University of Texas Catalogue identified him as a freshman electrical engineering student who had entered the University as a graduate of the San Antonio Academy, which was one of 110 schools that were affiliated with the University of Texas at that time. Applicants to UT who held a diploma from an affiliated school could be admitted without having to take an entrance exam.
Goodman was listed as a sophomore engineering student in the UT catalogues for both 1906-1907 and 1907-1908. The 1908-1909 catalogue identified him as a junior law student. He was a member of the 1908 Longhorn football team and reportedly spent time playing left tackle and center. He was not a regular starter in 1908 but played often enough that he was one of just 13 players who were awarded varsity letters after that season, a very low number even for an era when starters played on both offense and defense and were rarely substituted out except in case of injury, and in which players generally had to get a significant amount of playing time in at least half the games of a season to qualify for a letter.
Louis Jordan (1911-14)
Louis John Jordan was born in 1890 and was a native of Fredericksburg, a town in the Texas Hill Country about 80 miles west of Austin that was founded in 1846 by German immigrants. Jordan’s mother and both of his paternal grandparents were born in present-day Germany before coming to Texas. He received his early education in the public schools of Fredericksburg, and after receiving a teaching certificate he worked as a schoolteacher for a few years while in his late teens before completing his preparatory education at the San Antonio Academy, from which he graduated in 1911 when he was 21 years old.
He entered UT as a freshman engineering student in the fall of 1911 and joined the Longhorn football team. Over the next three years he developed into arguably the greatest linemen in the early decades of Texas Longhorns football. He was reported in 1912 to be 6’1” in height (later reports claimed he was as tall as 6’4”), and he weighed around 205 pounds. He was a big man for a football player of his era, and an offensive guard that size would not have looked out of place on Longhorn teams even into the early 1960s.
The 1913 Longhorn team went 7-1 and won the championship of the Texas Intercollegiate Athletic Association (TIAA). In that era team captains were typically chosen by a vote of the team’s returning lettermen mere weeks or even days after the conclusion of a season. Texas played its final game of the 1913 season on Thanksgiving Day, a game that resulted in a 29-7 loss to visiting Notre Dame. By the time that week ended Louis Jordan had already been elected team captain for the 1914 season.
A TIAA all-conference team was not named that year, but coaches from eight colleges in Texas gave their selections for an “all-state” team to the Houston Post. Jordan was one of nine players from the TIAA champion Texas Longhorns who earned a spot on the Post’s composite all-state team, and he was the unanimous choice as the state’s best right guard for 1913.22
As a 24-year-old senior in 1914, Jordan captained a Longhorn team that finished with a perfect 8-0 record, won the championship of the TIAA for a second straight year, and outscored their opponents by a combined 358-21.23 Decades later, Texas was retroactively named the national champion for the 1914 college football season by the Billingsley Report, but Texas does not claim a national championship for that year.
After the 1914 season, Louis Jordan was selected by famed football innovator Walter Camp to his All-America second team. Camp had picked “All-America” teams annually since at least the 1890s, but his selections were almost uniformly players from colleges in the northeast or midwest sections of the country for many years. Jordan was the first player from a southern college to make Camp’s All-America second team, and it was not until 1918 that Georgia Tech center Bum Day became the first player from a southern college to grace Camp’s All-America first team.
In addition to winning four letters in football, Jordan was also an exceptional thrower on the Longhorn track & field team, winning three letters in that sport and setting a state record in the hammer throw.
Jordan graduated from the University of Texas in 1915 and spent a year on the faculty of the San Antonio Academy, but resigned that position after one year to take a job as an engineer with the Public Service Company of San Antonio.24
He enlisted in the Army in 1917 after the United States officially entered what we now call World War I, and after going through the First Officers Training Camp at Leon Springs he was commissioned a lieutenant and shipped out to France in October of 1917. He was killed in action on March 5, 1918, and several reports indicated that he was the first officer from Texas to die while serving in that war. Jordan was one of 75 former UT students (including four Longhorn football lettermen) who died while serving in the military during World War I, according to the 1919 Cactus yearbook.
So highly esteemed was Louis Jordan as a UT student-athlete that he was the very first Longhorn athlete inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor after it was created in 1957.
Joe Ellis (1920)
Joseph Ferguson Ellis was born in 1896 and was a native of Lockhart, Texas, a city about 25 miles south of Austin. According to his obituary he received his early education in Lockhart’s public schools before attending the Marshall Training School in San Antonio, and then completing his preparatory education at the San Antonio Academy. He began his college career at Texas A&M and played on its freshmen football team in 1916, then left school to serve in the Army during World War I. After his discharge he enrolled at the University of Texas in the fall of 1919 and went on to become a three-sport letterman with the Longhorns, winning letters in baseball, track & field, and football. He was likely the fastest athlete UT had at the time, and reports from 1921 state that he had recorded a time in the 100-yard dash that was shy of the world record by mere tenths of a second.
He played halfback on the Longhorn football team in 1920 and was the second Joe Ellis to play for the Longhorns in the span of three years. A San Saba, Texas native named Joe Henry Ellis had been a standout halfback on the 1918 Longhorn squad. Joe F. Ellis missed a few games in the 1920 season due to injury, but was generally lauded for his play in the games he appeared in. The 1920 Longhorns finished with a spotless record of 9-0 and outscored their opponents 282-13. It was the last Longhorn team to finish with no losses or ties until the 1963 national championship team.
Joe F. Ellis elected not to return to the Longhorn football team in 1921, as he intended to concentrate on his baseball career. He was receiving interest from professional baseball clubs at least as early as the summer of 1921, and collegiate players could sign with professional clubs at any time since the amateur baseball draft was not instituted until over four decades later. Ellis had played catcher during his brief time at Texas A&M and was most experienced at that position, but he had also ably filled the shortstop position for the Texas Longhorns. The St. Louis Cardinals began pursuing him in the spring of 1922, hoping to sign him as a catcher. The Cardinals’ backup catcher from the previous year, William “Pickles” Dillhoefer, had died after a bout with typhoid fever on February 23, 1922, and their club was in need of depth at that position.
The Cardinals conducted their spring training sessions in Orange, Texas at that time, and a scout from the Cardinals visited Austin in early March looking to sign Ellis and bring him immediately to Orange.
After considering the option of finishing the spring semester at UT and joining the Cardinals in the summer, Ellis opted to sign with the team in late March, and reportedly received a clause in his contract that required the Cardinals to keep him on the major league club for the entire 1922 season “as a reward for reporting now instead of at the close of the season”.25
Ellis reported to the Cardinals’ training camp, but ultimately never played a game in the major leagues. A knee injury suffered during a practice game ended up sending him to a hospital, and one of his legs was in a cast for several weeks afterward. By May of 1923, it was reported that his “bum” knee had forced him to retire from pro baseball before his career had truly begun.26
As far as I am aware, Joe F. Ellis was the last San Antonio Academy graduate to win a football letter at the University of Texas. Though the Academy has not served high school students since 1926, no other school in its city has produced as many Longhorn football lettermen in the 99 years since then as the 14 that the Academy sent to UT between 1893 and 1920.
In addition to the UT football lettermen named above, there was at least one other San Antonio Academy graduate who was a member of the UT football team but did not letter.
Herbert Henne (1882-1932) was a native of New Braunfels, Texas who attended the San Antonio Academy after receiving his early education from his hometown’s public schools. He was the salutatorian of the Academy’s class of 1900 and was awarded the alumni trophy as “the athlete who stood highest in scholarship”. Henne attended the University of Texas from 1900 to 1903, and as a freshman in 1900 he was a backup guard on that year’s undefeated varsity football team and appeared in at least two games, but he was not awarded a letter by the Athletic Council. After graduating in 1903 with a Bachelor of Laws degree, Henne practiced law for nearly three decades until his death in 1932.
If any UT football or San Antonio Academy historians know of an Academy grad I’ve missed (by this I mean graduates from its prep school days, not ones who attended as middle school students post-1926), please let me know in the comments.
By my own count, the San Antonio Academy has had at least 14 former students who won a varsity football letter at Texas. The only San Antonio high schools that even approach that number are: Winston Churchill High School (13), Fox Tech, which was originally San Antonio High School (12), Thomas Jefferson High School (10), and G.W. Brackenridge High School (9).
https://www.sa-academy.org/about/history
"San Antonio Academy — A complete educational institution to be established — our boys to be taught at home”, San Antonio Daily Light, April 28, 1886; front page.
San Antonio Daily Light, December 13, 1889; page 5. A digital copy of this issue is available via The Portal to Texas History.
The Longhorn nickname was not commonly used to describe UT’s athletic teams until 1903, but UT football players of the pre-1903 era will be retroactively given the “Longhorn” label by this blog.
“Blue Bonnet Legacy Families Inducted” Bond of Brothers (the Official Magazine for San Antonio Academy of Texas), Year in Review 2016-17; page 67.
“John F. Maverick Sr, son of pioneer family, dies at 82”, Houston Post, February 19, 1957; section 3, page 10. Obituaries for John Frost Maverick that were published in the Houston Post and several other newspapers in Texas stated that his mother Sarah “is said to have been the first white woman born in Texas.”
The University of Texas Record, volume IV, numbers 1-2, May 1902; Alumni Catalogue, 1884-1901; page 124,
George Maverick Green’s parents were the former Rena Maverick (George Vance Maverick’s older sister) and Robert Berrien Green, who was elected to three terms as Bexar County judge and was a state senator at the time of his death in 1907.
“Last Rites Held Here Friday for W.R. Schreiner”, Kerrville Mountain Sun, April 13, 1933; page 1.
The official Texas Longhorns all-time football lettermen list credits quarterback Rick McIvor and defensive back Van Malone as five-year lettermen, McIvor from 1979 to 1983, and Malone from 1989 to 1993. This is likely in error, as both players had a season that
“Dean Taylor Picks All-Time Team”, Austin Statesman, February 20, 1925; page 5.
“Ex-Longhorn Semp Russ Active at 91”, Austin American, April 16, 1969; page 21.
“Scribe Makes Will, Tells His Friends Goodby, Picks an All-Time Team”, Austin American, November 13, 1935; page 9.
Texas Bar Journal, Volume 15 No. 3 (March 1952), page 136.
Texas Bar Journal, Volume 4 No. 12 (December 1941), page 795. The Texas Bar Association was founded in 1882 and operated until the 1939 State Bar Act was adopted by the state legislature and created its successor organization: the State Bar of Texas.
“Statistics Foot Ball Team 1903”, 1904 Cactus yearbook, page 180.
“Deaths and Funerals - Miss K. Andrews Searcy”, Austin Statesman, October 15, 1965; page 10.
Sources differ on whether Thomas C. Frost’s middle name was spelled “Clayborne” or “Claiborne”.
“Closing Exercises of the Seeley School”, San Antonio Daily Light, May 27, 1904; page 3.
“Julian Rodgers Dies; City Aide”, Detroit Free Press, March 21, 1967; page 6-A.
“Nine Longhorns Make The Composite Team of All Selections for Season”, Houston Post, November 30, 1913; page 17.
The 1914 football season was the last for the University of Texas as a member of the Texas Intercollegiate Athletic Association. Texas was a charter member of the Southwest Conference when it was organized in 1914, and the first football season for that nascent conference was in 1915.
“Former Teacher Here Killed at War Front”, San Antonio Express, March 10, 1918; page 1.
“Texas Varsity Player Joins St. Louis Nine”, El Paso Herald, March 28, 1922; page 9.
“Texas Varsity Team Sends in Bigtime Stars”, Fort Worth Record, May 15, 1923; page 8.