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his surprise successor. However, after five games in 1949, Bedenk told athletic department officials he wanted to go back to being a football assistant and concentrate on coaching the baseball team. That led directly to the hiring of an outsider, Rip Engle from Brown, who – as the now-familiar story goes – brought along his college quarterback, Joe Paterno, and forever changed the history of Penn State football. Bedenk left the football staff after the 1952 season. Meanwhile, Medlar continued as the football team's head trainer until his retirement in 1983, 12 years after his induction into the National Athletic Trainers' Association in 1971. Bedenk's love for baseball was evident to everyone who knew him. He was a hard ass as a football coach, and in his younger days he took delight in demonstrating techniques – some of them illegal – one-on-one with his linemen. He was a bit mellower on the baseball field, perhaps because the sport itself is far less violent than football. I became acquainted with both Bedenk and Medlar as an undergraduate writing for The Daily Collegian in the late 1950s. They were both friendly and accommodating to young Collegian reporters and treated us with respect, even asking us to call them by their first names despite our age differential. At first, that was more difficult to do with Bedenk because he seemed more like a father figure to me, while Medlar was more like an uncle. What I remember most about Bedenk is that he liked to talk about baseball, particularly major league baseball, and strategy. Medlar used to kid us young reporters a lot, and he called everyone "stud." Now, look up the word in the dictionary and it is defined as a term for the breeding of horses or slang for "a man regarded as virile and sexually active." Actually, it was Medlar's sly way of being friendly with someone without having to remember their name. Frankly, at the time I didn't know much about the athletic backgrounds of either Bedenk or Medlar. I really didn't begin learning about them until I started working on my first Penn State book, the Penn State Football Encyclopedia, in 1996. And it wasn't until five years ago, while researching a story about Bedenk's outstanding 1957 baseball team, that I found out about his involvement in the creation of the College World Series. It all came about because of the expanding popularity of football and basketball in the mid- to late 1940s and the continuing loss of undergraduate talent to professional baseball. Bedenk and his friend Eppy Barnes, the head coach at Colgate, believed college baseball needed to stop the increasing encroachment of the professionals. One way to do it, they agreed, was to do a better job of selling their sport better to the public. They knew they couldn't do it alone, so they decided to form an organization for college baseball coaches. Baseball coaches were already far behind their peers in football and basketball, who had started coaches associations two decades earlier – football in 1921 and basketball in 1927. Baseball had been the most popular sport in the country in the 1920s, and there didn't seem to be any need to promote it. But by the mid-1940s, football and basketball had narrowed the gap. So in early 1945, Bedenk and Barnes proceeded to survey 200 college baseball coaches. More than 140 responded. On June 19, 1945, 27 coaches met at the New York Athletic Club. One of the speakers pushing the idea was Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers who had played baseball at Ohio Wesleyan and been the head coach at Allegheny (Ohio) Wesleyan and even at Michigan while attending law school. Two years later, Rickey would help Jackie Robinson break the major league color line. The coaches agreed to form an official group called the American Association of College Baseball Coaches with an annual membership of $5 for G OMIN ST C GU N AU I The Remarkable Journey of the 2012 Nittany Lions By Lou Prato Author of the Penn State Football Encyclopedia and four other Nittany Lion football books SEE PRATO PAGE 60

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