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RPI Thanks Rams
Highlight of 38 years!

In Memoriam
Charlotte Saxe Schreiberg
Martha Hill Newell
Dr. Wallace Johnston
Carroll Hormachea
Bruce Koplin
Alice Loving Alrich
Emile Cahen Jr.
Jaqui Jacobs Copeland
Dr. Arnold Fleshood

Above: The Braves (William&Mary Norfolk Division, now Old Dominion) battle RPI Green Devils

Ed Peeples ’57BS/Ed was co-captain of the RPI Green Devils for their first winning season, his senior year, 1956-57. “When I arrived at RPI in 1953, resources for everything at RPI were scarce, despite the genius of Dr. Henry Hibbs’s masterful schemes to rob Peter to pay Paul,” he says. Funds from the General Assembly were minuscule but somehow Dr. Henry Hibbs managed to get them to build a “new gym” set back from the 800 block of Franklin on the alley.” Actually, half of one; the Franklin Street side--of the "Franklin Street Gym"--was completed later, in a second round of funding.

  “Ed Allen, our coach and a marvelous man,” coached all of the men’s athletic teams and taught most of the physical education courses as well. No sports scholarships, no scheduling classes around afternoon practice. (Coach Grant’s players have mentioned a few 4 am practices.) “So you really had to love this game in order to stick with the team. And love it, we did.”

  “It did not take long for me to catch the RPI fever. This place was going somewhere and a lot of us students somehow knew this. Fifty-four years ago my teammates and I saw a glimmer of this and began each successive year to climb out of our role as a doormat for other Virginia basketball teams in intercollegiate play.

  During Ed’s senior year, “we finally had the quality of players and the relentless will to have our first winning season, 13-9.” They finished third in the Little Eight Conference, perhaps the equivalent of today’s NCAA Division II. Until then RPI had always finished last. In 1996, the 56-57 Green Devils were inducted into the VCU Athletics Hall of Fame, at a game with Miami of Ohio.

  Credit for the strangest play that season goes to Ed. In a game against Bridgewater , he bounced an inbounds pass off a Bridgewater player’s back, caught the ball and dropped it in the basket. “It surprised our opponents, to say the least. To my knowledge Scotty Pippin, formerly of the Chicago Bulls, and I are the only ones who have ever pulled it off,” Ed smiles.  

“Grant has once again taken Richmond ”

  Ed is emphatic that the VCU Rams’ achievement this year “has got to be the most remarkable single uplifting contribution to our future.” It’s especially thrilling to the Green Devils that the VCU Rams accomplished this precisely at the 50th anniversary of that first winning team in 1956-57. Beyond the Rams’s championship play in the CAA and the NCAA, Ed adds, “they represented the RPI /VCU family with great doggedness and dignity. We were so proud of them. Grant has once again taken Richmond , and this time everybody approves of the invasion.”

  Speaking for his classmates and teammates, Ed says to Coach Anthony Grant and all of the 2006-07 VCU Rams, “Thank you for taking our dream to the summit.” 

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