Meet John Morgan – Red Dragon and Great Dane
November 7, 2022
Don’t tell Kevin or Ashley, but I took a 45-minute break from my Lake Placid duties this past August and sat down to chat with John Morgan for a while. I’d known John since sometime in the ‘80s, but this was the most we had ever really spoken to one another. I wanted to hear his story – how he was introduced to lacrosse, his background, and of course, some great stories…
When John Morgan graduated from Eldred Central School in 1956, his senior class included just 10 boys and 4 girls. He played the three sports his Sullivan County school offered back then – football, basketball, and baseball. “Football was six-man back then, but we moved up to eight-man my senior year,” he told me. “That was the best!” As for baseball, he admitted that he “kept score better than I played.”
Interested in a teaching career, John enrolled at (sigh) Cortland State, and his first look at lacrosse came during his freshman year fall semester. His sociology teacher (“I’d never heard of that word before!”) cancelled class one afternoon because he wanted to watch a fall scrimmage between Cortland and Syracuse University – and SU just happened to have a player named Jim Brown on their team. “He scored two or three goals and I said to myself, ‘I love this game!’”.
College schoolwork presented a challenge, and between getting married, getting drafted, and getting dismissed briefly from school, John persevered and graduated in 1963. “It took me seven years, but I did it,” he chuckled. In his second stint at Cortland, he played defense for the Red Dragons’ JV lacrosse team and took a part-time job working for a Dean in the Admissions office. “I didn’t have a title, but I earned a little extra money. I really enjoyed that kind of work.”
He went on to teach at Altamont Elementary School in the Albany suburb, and he refereed his first lacrosse game in 1964 – when he was called out of the stands by Union head coach Bruce Allison to work a game against Dartmouth. “There was no high school lacrosse in the Albany area back then, so many of us started off doing college games.”
Around that time, a friend who worked in the student financial office at SUNY Albany asked him if would be interested in a full-time job; when John said yes, he was hired on the spot. He became the student loan coordinator in 1966.
One day, a student walked into John’s office and talk turned to lacrosse. Steve Jakeway was from Baldwinsville, and he told John that he and a bunch of his UAlbany friends had played high school lacrosse, and he wondered why Albany didn’t have a team. According to John, the seeds were planted that day, and he and Joe Silvey, a former (sigh) Cortland attackman, started the first men’s lacrosse team at U Albany. The friends that Jakeway mentioned included LaFayette’s Mark Werder and Long Island’s Kevin Sheehan.
“Back then, all the refs, all the coaches – everyone involved with college lacrosse was a Cortland grad,” explained John. (sigh). Other highlights from those early days included an unusual trip to New York City for the annual coaches’ convention. “Bruce Allison won the Coach of the Year Award, so we wanted to go down to the City so he could receive his award. We didn’t have any money back then, so we took a Greyhound bus.”
Meanwhile, the Guilderland school district was proving to be ground zero for the growth of Section 2 lacrosse. Russ Ferris was a teacher in the district, along with Arty Waugh. Russ was the head coach at Siena back then, and Arty became an assistant coach for the Saints. After a few years of rushing off from school to practices and games, they said to one another, why don’t we just start a high school program right here at Guilderland? They did so, leading the way for other scholastic programs to follow. John said, “Arty was a great guy; he went with us to Europe on a ski trip. My son played for him when he was in high school.”
John coached the UAlbany men’s team for three years, and then the school hired Bob Ford to coach both football and lacrosse. “They did pretty well and tied for the league title with Ithaca that year, but they only had one trophy, so they told Bob he had to share it with Ithaca.”
In the years that followed, John climbed the administrative ladder at UAlbany, reaching the title of Assistant Provost. His lacrosse involvement was primarily in officiating, but he was often overlooked for the biggest games. “Albany officials weren’t seen as being especially strong, because there just wasn’t much lacrosse in our area. I did a Syracuse/Hobart game, and I reffed Simmie’s (Roy Simmons, Sr.’s) last game, at Union. I didn’t do the big NCAA championship games because, by the time those were a big draw, I was too old,” he explained.
He went on, “I did do a lot of the JUCO national championships, and we had great junior college teams back then. Nassau, Suffolk, and Cobleskill… all coached by old Cortland guys” (Rich Speckmann, Fred Acee, and Stan Nevins). In fact, John went to a Cortland 50-year class reunion in 2013 – “I really enjoyed that,” he said. He mentioned Dr. John Spring, my coach at Oswego State – another Cortland grad, of course – who was the Athletic Director at Oswego, then Geneseo, and eventually became Executive Director of the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association (USILA).
In his final years at UAlbany, he served as the university’s Athletic Director, and retired around 1995. Locally, John taught new lacrosse officials the rules and mechanics. He reffed basketball as well, and he was the assistant director of the Adirondack Region’s Empire State Games teams back when they existed. “Fred Gula was the director, and we started going out to practices and events in April, as soon as we could get outside, and watched all the sports. Ever watch a shooting practice?” he laughed.
Lacrosse officiating offered John a chance to travel. “I reffed in England for the World Cup, but I didn’t do a lot of international lacrosse. I reffed the championship game in Vail, and of course, in Lake Placid.”
Ah yes – Lake Placid. I asked John if he was one of the legendary “Original Seven” officials who worked the very first Lake Placid Tournament in 1990. Not surprisingly, he said yes.
How did that happen? I asked.
“I went into Mike DeRossi’s shop to buy sneakers one day, and George Leveille walked in. We got talking, and he asked me if I wanted to work up in Lake Placid. I said sure!”
As the Lake Placid Summit Classic grew, John became the director of its officials, no small task. A few years ago, he passed that torch along to Tom Abbott, but he and his partner Andrea Lister still make the trip north to Placid every August. Andrea helps with administrative duties in tournament HQ, while John likes to hang out with all the other officials under the referees’ tent.
John was inducted into the Adirondack Chapter of US Lacrosse’s Hall of Fame in 2016.
John Morgan – a proud Red Dragon and a game-changer for the UAlbany Great Danes. If you know, you know.
And if you didn’t, you do now.
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- Dan Witmer
daniel.witmer@oswego.edu