Actually, it was kids getting into trouble that started Pop Warner in the first place. It seems that the owner of a new factory in Northeast Philadelphia in

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1929 had a problem with kids breaking huge floor to ceiling windows—100 in one month. So the owner turned to Joe Tomlin, an excellent athlete, for help. He suggested the factory owners fund an athletic program for kids, which they did. By 1933, the Junior Football Conference, as it was called, had expanded to 16 teams.

That year Glenn Scobie “Pop” Warner (he was older than most of his Cornell teammates when he played football there, hence the nickname) arrived in Philadelphia to coach the Temple Owls. Pop Warner had been a coach at the University of Georgia, Cornell, and then the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania (where he all but invented the forward pass using a spiral throw), then the University of Pittsburgh (with two national championships), and finally Stanford where his teams won three Rose Bowl Championships. Finally, he came to Philadelphia.

Joe Tomlin asked Warner, along with a dozen other coaches, to speak to players in the league and he agreed. In a foreshadowing of the spirit the league still engenders, the evening—April 19, 1934—turned out to be filled with torrential rains mixed with sleet. Eight hundred kids showed up, but Pop Warner was the only speaker to appear. For over two hours, they listened as he talked and answered their questions. By the end of the evening, by popular acclaim, the fledgling youth program was renamed the Pop Warner Conference.

Today, the Pop Warner-Little Scholars League has eight regions in over 42 states with 145 leagues and more than 400,000 kids participating. The “Little Scholars” designation stems from the fact that if you want to play football or be a cheerleader in the league, you have to turn in your report card before you can start. If your grades aren’t up to snuff, you can’t play. More than one parent we talked to credited this single factor as the motivation for an amazing discovery of heretofore unknown academic ability on the part of their child.