Alvin Lowell "Chigger" Browne (August 3, 1888 – March 2, 1955) was a

college football College football (french: Football universitaire) refers to gridiron football played by teams of student athletes. It was through college football play that American football rules first gained popularity in the United States. Unlike most ...

player and track coach.

Sewanee

Browne was a

quarterback The quarterback (commonly abbreviated "QB"), colloquially known as the "signal caller", is a position in gridiron football. Quarterbacks are members of the offensive platoon and mostly line up directly behind the offensive line. In modern Ame ...

for the

Sewanee Tigers The University of the South, familiarly known as Sewanee (), is a private Episcopal Church (United States), Episcopal Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Sewanee, Tennessee. It is owned by 28 Province 4 of the Epis ...

of Sewanee: The University of the South from 1908 to 1910. Browne also played

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding tea ...

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appr ...

, and track. He was twice selected All-Southern, and mentioned by

Grantland Rice Henry Grantland "Granny" Rice (November 1, 1880July 13, 1954) was an early 20th-century American sportswriter known for his elegant prose. His writing was published in newspapers around the country and broadcast on the radio. Early years Rice wa ...

as one of the great little men of the sport, once weighing only 111 pounds. He was most often listed as some 5 feet 8 inches tall and 125 pounds. Rice also said he was "harder to surround and tackle than a

flea Flea, the common name for the order Siphonaptera, includes 2,500 species of small flightless insects that live as external parasites of mammals and birds. Fleas live by ingesting the blood of their hosts. Adult fleas grow to about long, a ...

." He could run 100 meters in 10 seconds flat. At Sewanee he was a member of Kappa Alpha.

1908

College Football Hall of Fame quarterback

Harry Van Surdam Henderson Edmund "Harry" "Dutch" Van Surdam (September 28, 1881 – May 28, 1982) was an American football player, coach, and official, musician, composer, bandleader, and superintendent of the El Paso Military Institute. Van Surdam played colleg ...

, coach of the 1908 team, said of Browne, he "was the greatest quarterback that I have ever seen in my 50 years of being connected with football as a coach and official . . . he was fast as lightning and wasn't afraid of anything. Chigger was so small that we had to keep him taped up to prevent him from getting broken up . . . We had only 18 men on the squad. If we wanted to scrimmage we had to bend the line around."

1909

Browne was quarterback on the SIAA champion 1909 team.

Coaching career

University of Florida

He coached the Florida Gators track team of the

University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...

in 1926 and 1927.

References