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sociated with a local social club and was renamed the Loendi Club. The Loendi Club quickly evolved from a semipro team paying players a few dollars into a sponsored professional team paying up to $75 per game and eventually became one of the most famous teams in basket- ball. Posey not only played guard and forward, wrote Rob Ruck, but was "the floor general during the game... man- aged the finances and promoted the team off the court." Despite all my extensive research, I still don't know how the 19-year-old Posey wound up at Penn State in the fall of 1909 following his graduation from high school, where he had led Home- stead to the Pittsburgh City Basketball championship in his senior year. Nowhere in all books, articles and re- search about Posey and his well-to-do family is there anything definitive. What I learned is that Posey enrolled to study chemistry and pharmacy, one of 1,417 students that academic year – the largest class in school history. Posey may have been the only African-Ameri- can at Penn State, but records on the ethnicity of students were not kept then. Baseball and football were the major varsity sports on campus, with basket- ball and track and field on the second tier and the newest varsity sport, wrestling, just starting that year. Freshman phenom With the increased digitalization of the school yearbook and student newspaper files over the years since I first began working at the museum, I have been able to uncover many details of Posey's time at Penn State. But whether he ever had a chance to try out for the varsity basketball team as a freshman is a matter of specula- tion. The weekly State Collegian, fore- runner of today's Daily Collegian, includ- ed a story about the team's first practice on Nov. 15, 1909, noting that "There are several promising candidates from the freshman class." On the same page, the newspaper described the creation of a "newly organized interclass basketball league" and a practice schedule two days a week in the Armory, which was the col- lege's all-purpose indoor building at the time, for each of the four classes. The rules of the new league stated the follow- ing: "All members of a class who do not belong to the varsity basketball squad shall be eligible to the class teams." One can assume Posey tried out for the varsity team, but I have been unable to confirm that. The program didn't have a coach in those days. Ever since it was es- tablished in 1897, the team captain had been in charge. In 1909, senior Burke "Dutch" Herman was the captain. Coin- cidentally, seven years later Herman would become the first head coach, and his 20-year tenure from 1916-35 is still longer than any of his 11 successors. Herman and the team manager, W.C. Summer, were responsible for selecting the 1909 varsity roster. A week before the first scheduled game, against the Harris- burg Athletic Club at the Armory, the State Collegian advised that "the prospects for a strong team are very en- couraging" and singled out three fresh- men who were "unusually strong," but Posey wasn't one of them. Only two freshmen were selected for the 10-man squad, center J. Haddow and forward H.E. Shore. Both were immediate starters, and, as the school yearbook cited later, they "developed into strong players." Posey became the star of the freshman interclass team, and that made him pop- ular with the student body, for the new league was a hit with students. The four teams played a nine-game round-robin schedule, and the freshmen surprised everyone, finishing second with a 5-4 record behind the juniors, who won the league championship with a 7-2 mark. There were no detailed accounts of the games in the State Collegian, but the yearbook later referred to Posey in the grandiose prose of the era as "the flower of the freshman team." As the basketball league was winding up, the varsity baseball team was start- ing practice. Again, I can only speculate that Posey tried out for the team. Only one freshman was able to make the 16- man varsity roster: Haddow, the starting center on the varsity basketball squad. However, there is no doubt that Posey played left field for the freshman inter- class baseball team in the spring of 1910. In the 1912 La Vie photo of the 13-man squad, he is sitting in the second row, right behind a classmate who would be- come one of Penn State's greatest foot- ball players, Dex Very. The seniors won the championship with a 6-3 record, and the freshmen tied the juniors for second place at 4-4. 'Baskets with great rapidity' In late September, Posey was back at Penn State for the start of his sopho- more year, but 88 of his 435 freshman classmates were missing. According to the State Collegian, Posey was among the 25 candidates for what would be a squad of 11 to 13 players, including three starters from the 1909-10 varsity. After one month of practice, Posey had impressed the new captain, guard Frank Blythe, and the graduated Dutch Her- man, who was helping coach the 1910

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