Remembering Howard’s 1974 NCAA soccer championship

HOWARD UNIVERSITY

Howard won the 1974 NCAA soccer title with a 2-1 decision against St. Louis to cap a perfect season. The Bison are the only historically Black program in any sport to win a Division I national title.

Dec. 7 marked a notable achievement in college sports that went under the radar.

It was the 51st anniversary of the first NCAA Division I championship in any sport won by a historically Black college. Howard University faced the then-historically soccer dominant St. Louis University and reclaimed glory previously taken away. The Bison emerged victorious in the tournament now called the College Cup with a 2-1 win after four overtimes.

Three years earlier    

Technically, Howard earned its first title in 1971 with a 3-2 win against the 1969 and 1970 champion St. Louis. They were victorious on the pitch at the Orange Bowl in Miami on Dec. 30, but the title was later revoked. The championship was vacated by the NCAA but not given to the Billikens. Howard’s semifinal berth in the 1970 tournament was also vacated by the NCAA.

Before that, the Bison were invited to the White House, as reported by the Washington Post in a 2014 story, “But the players declined, determined not to be used for Richard Nixon’s political purposes during an election year.”

“I regret it now,” (former player Mori) Diane says. “We should have gone. But at the time, with Vietnam and everything else, we felt we had to make a statement.”

Howard also made the final four in 1972, losing in a semifinal to St. Louis 2-1 in overtime. Probation kept them out of the 1973 tournament.

Interviewed by the late Grant Wahl for a 1997 Sports Illustrated story, Ian Bain, a Trinidad & Tobago native who was a freshman on that 1971 team said, "We felt we had been wronged.”

"We feel that it is simply because we are a black institution that the NCAA was requested to investigate," Howard President James E. Cheek said in a statement at the time.

"It's pretty evident that a black school is not supposed to win," Bison coach Lincoln Phillips said after the 1972 semifinal, a 2-1 loss to St. Louis University in which Howard held out seven players accused by the NCAA of eligibility violations. (The NCAA later shortened the list to four.) The NCAA, Phillips went on, was "guilty of practicing racism."

As described by Wahl, “The starting 11 on Howard's 1971 soccer team all hailed from Caribbean and African countries. The NCAA charged that two of the players had previously exhausted their eligibility by playing amateur soccer in Trinidad, and two others had not taken NCAA-mandated entrance exams to predict a 1.6 grade point average. Howard argued that the four players had GPAs over 3.0 and that the violated rules were vague and discriminated against foreigners. The school eventually challenged the NCAA in court and won a partial ruling that an NCAA regulation regarding foreign students’ eligibility was discriminatory, but failed to have the national title restored.”

The international flavor of Howard’s team was not an outlier. As reported by Wahl, among 10,152 students at the Washington, D.C., school in 1971, 1,700 were from 72 nations.

Redemption song

In the 1974 final, the Bisons faced St. Louis once again, this time at the then-home of both the MLB and NFL St. Louis Cardinals, Busch Stadium. There were 2,921 fans at the 60,000-seat arena.

On their path to the postseason, Howard outscored opponents 63-6 in 14 games before going on to beat George Washington (2-0), Clemson (1-0), Philadelphia Textile (5-3) before downing Hartwick (2-1) in the semifinal. They finished the season unbeaten and untied in 19 games, the last team to do so. The last unbeaten team was Santa Clara (20-0-3) who were declared co-champions with Virginia in 1989. That final was stopped after two overtimes in sub-freezing weather.

Phillips came to the U.S. in 1968 from Trinidad & Tobago and coached the team from 1970-80.

“My first year in 1970, Howard University came out of nowhere and went straight to the final four,” Phillips said on a Howard social media video post. They lost to UCLA 4-3 in a semifinal.

“So, we went on to that championship in ’71 and only tied one game. All the other games we won. Coaches felt that the NCAA should level the playing field. They came up with 115 violations. Two of them stuck. They took away our championship from us and put us on one year probation.

“In 1974 championship, it’s not like we just won a championship. It’s how we won it. We won every single game. Howard University is the only – not just HBCU – but the only university in the United States to have won an NCAA championship untied and unbeaten. The record still stands. That is Black History.”

The record Phillips refers to is for most games in an undefeated/untied championship season. St. Louis in 1969 (16-0) and 1965 (14-0), Navy in 1964 (15-0), and West Chester in 1961 (12-0) also went without a loss or draw.

The Bison had a mantra for that 1974 season – “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again.”

Wahl described the racism that the team faced.

During road games the insults were legion. "They'd say, 'Go back, banana boat. Go back, monkey. Go back to the jungle,'" Phillips recalls. "I had to tell my players that anytime that is done, it's fine to get angry, but you have to know how to get angry: Put the balls in the back of the net."

Here Phillips smiles. "They did that with amazing regularity, you know."

At the start of the '74 season, Phillips asked Dom Basil Matthews, a professor at the university, to speak to the team one day before practice. The players listened as Matthews described their role in what he called a triangle of blackness.

"He told them if you look back at the slave trade, you see people taken away from Africa to the West Indies and the United States," Phillips says. "The farther they came away, the more they were stripped out of their culture. The only thing missing was that line back to Africa, an acceptance of one's self. That's where Howard University is positioned – within the middle of that triangle, bringing the cultures together. And soccer was a big part of that."

When Matthews finished, the team was silent. "That was the first time that all of us as a group related to the idea of race in the environment we were now living in," says Bain. "But it was beyond race. It was like [Nelson] Mandela speaking, someone who is in a situation of race but seems above the race issue.

Matthews wanted the season to be not so much a blow against white America or the NCAA but to bring pride to all of the different African groups, so that people all over the black world would notice our team."

"We weren't just playing soccer," says Phillips. "We were representing the game, our school and blackness. We felt black people needed to tell themselves they could succeed just like anybody else. So we had to be good."

Howard’s 1974 title, as well as the loss of the ’71 championship, was documented in an ESPN series produced by Spike Lee in an episode called “Redemption Song” that first aired in 2016. It can be seen here. 

Continued success never guaranteed

Howard would make the semifinals of the 1975 tournament as well, losing to Southern Illinois-Evansville 3-1. A third-place game was played that tournament with the Bison falling 2-0 to Brown. They lost to Clemson 2-1 in the second round of the 1976 tournament.

In all, Howard has competed in 10 tournaments (1962-63-72-74-75-76-80-88-89-97) but it’s been a long time since they were a dominant fixture. A current Charlotte connection to Bison soccer is junior forward Jorden Julien, who played at Mallard Creek High School, where he earned all-conference and all-region.

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