Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
October 6, 2000, Washington Post

Banging the drum for Gallaudet football.

The football season is under way, so I went to a game. But the game I saw wasn't your usual football game.

A crowd filled the stands but it was strangely quiet. We rose for the national anthem, but no band played and nobody sang. Instead, three cheerleaders stood in the middle of the
field signing "The Star Spangled Banner" with their hands.

During the game, a home-team coach wheeled a huge bass drum along the
sideline. When his team had the ball, he signaled the start of a play by pounding the drum with a big mallet.

I was at Gallaudet University, a college for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in
Washington.

The Gallaudet Bison have been playing football for more than 100 years. In fact,
the football huddle was invented at Gallaudet in 1894, by the team's star
quarterback, Paul Hubbard.

Hubbard worried that other teams--deaf and hearing teams--were stealing his
hand signals at the line of scrimmage. So he gathered his players in a huddle to
keep his sign language private.

Other teams liked the idea. Now, the huddle is as much a part of football as
helmets and shoulder pads.

The drum has not caught on with other teams, but it's an important part of
Gallaudet football.

Thirty years ago, the Gallaudet Bison did not have the drum and they had a big
problem.

Football plays typically start with the quarterback calling, "Hut . . . hut . . . hut
. . . " The team takes off on the first, second or third "hut," depending on what
the players decided in the huddle.

The Gallaudet players couldn't use the "hut" system because the players
couldn't hear the calls. They had to wait for the center to hike the ball. Well,
the opposing team also was watching for the center to hike the ball, so
Gallaudet could not "get the jump" on the play. Without that half-a-second head
start (it's more important than it sounds!), Gallaudet had trouble scoring.

R. Orin Cornett was at Gallaudet in 1970 and he tried to help. First he thought
about putting a radio transmitter on the center's hip. The quarterback would
push a button to send a signal to tiny radio receivers on his teammates'
helmets. A vibration in the player's helmets would signal when the play started.

Then he thought a strong flashing light might work better. He borrowed one from
an airport a few days before a football practice. However, Cornett never tried it
out, because as he was falling asleep one night he got another idea: a drum!

Cornett remembered the University of Texas band's big bass drum from when he
attended football games there. He remembered how he felt the vibrations when
the band pounded the drum.

Maybe the drum's vibrations could work as a football signal.

They did. Sure enough, the Gallaudet players couldn't hear the drum but they
could feel its vibrations. And, man, were the Bison ready to go.

They won three of their final four games of the 1970-71 season.

And although they haven't always had winning seasons, they have kept the
drum.

© 2000 The Washington Post Company