| First coach: Frank C. Longman | |
| Second coach: John L. Marks | |
| Third coach: Jesse C. Harper | |
| Cedar Point | |
| The Forward Pass | |
| Playing Statistics | |
Cedar Point | |||||||
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It was after a squad meeting that Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais went to talk to Harper privately.
- "We´ve got summer jobs at a seaside hotel called The Breakers at Cedar Point, Ohio, on the lake Erie. And we´re going to do some special practicing. Can we take a couple of footballs with us?", Rockne asked.
Harper raised an eyebrow. "Well yes, but what´s so special?"
What was so special was an idea Rockne and Dorais had about some new rules governing forward passing. So they went off to Cedar Point for a summer of clerking, janitoring, lifeguard job and waiting on table. For this they would get a room, meals and about $12 a week in wages. Tucked in with their sparse luggage was two footballs. They had definite plans and they set out to accomplish them.
Idlers, who came to watch, shook their heads over this insanity of those two young men.
Rockne saw that it wasn´t finished work to have the ball bounce against his arms and chest when he caught it. There were to many chances for fumbles that way. It cut your stride and it didn´t look neat.
Jess Harper remembers and tells: "There´s been lot´s of stories about that summer practice at forward passing. The truth was that Rock had always caught the ball in his stomach, and I told him he had to learn to catch it with his hands".
The stories tells wrong when they say that the two of them used to practice on the beach for hours at a time. They did a lot of running in the sand because it was good for the leg muscles and they also did toss the ball around a bit on the beach. But the duo worked out mostly on a turf field nearby their hotel. They had to in order to perfect what they had in mind and get their timing down pat.
What he meant was that there was no camping out under a pass, waiting for it to arrive. He´d grab it on the run, in full stride, if possible, and with open relaxed hands. No more breadbasket or medicine ball stuff. (He even experienced by catching it with one hand, but when they got back for fall practice Harper said nothing doing). Rockne admitted later, that he was quite possibly the first receiver to use his hands that way.
The two of them devoted time daily and seriously to the perfection of their respective jobs. They established pass routes and timing the patterns, so that Dorais could lead rock, or hit him over the shoulder, or put it right into him on a cut or curl back. It is safe to say that nobody ever thought of the possibilities those two did at Cedar Point. They planned and worked out new plays in which the pass was the all important feature. They soon learned that it had infinite possibilities, that instead of being a threat, it could be corporated into a system of play along with the line buck, end run or kick.
They even went so far as to have other fellows, who were familiar with football technique, put up a defence against their plays in mock scrimmage. They wanted to get these makeshift opponents´ reactions and they did. Cedar Point was a tradition to Rockne. He felt that his summer work-outs on it´s beach had been the turning point of his career.
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