We’ve hopefully taken some time the past few days, either publicly or privately, to contemplate the significance of today’s inauguration as well as the progress the country has and, in truth, has not made in the past years, decades and generations. Is it ideal? No, but it’s not to be ignored, either.

I don’t think this is or should be the place to discuss those things, what with it being a WVU sports blog, but I also think it’s timely to look back at the integration of WVU athletics in 1961 and some of the pioneers who’ve made many things possible today.

West Virginia by then was integrated with players like Garrett Ford, John Mallory and Ron Williams starring for the Mountaineers. But culturally, Morgantown was still adapting.

“There was hardly any social life,” Mallory once recalled. “In those days there were maybe 100 black students in the university. Out of those 100, there were only about 12 of those students who were athletes. There were no fraternities for us. During rush they used to bang on our door and when we would come to the door they would say, ‘Oh, we have the wrong room.’ We knew what that was about.”

Garrett Ford, the first African-American assistant football coach in 1970 who later moved into athletic administration, said the players in the mid-1960s were totally unprepared for what they encountered – especially on road trips in the south. At some places, Ford was told that blacks were not permitted outside the hotel after 6 o’clock.

When Jim Carlen arrived in 1966 no coaches on his staff had ever recruited a black athlete. Middle guard Carl Crennel was the first African-American player assistant coach Bobby Bowden had ever successfully recruited.