LEGACIES

Coleman’s heat: Tick was a star quarterback at Lincoln in the 1930s.

Tick’s Treat

Frank Coleman spent five decades fighting for Lincoln University to have football again. At 96, he finally made it happen.

by Ibram Rogers

On the hallowed historically black college grounds surrounded by rolling farmlands and wooded hilltops in southern Chester County, only one man is known as “Mr. Lincoln.”

It isn’t Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, who attended Lincoln University, 50 miles southwest of Philadelphia. Nor is it poet Langston Hughes, or Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah, the first presidents of Nigeria and Ghana, respectively—though they all attended Lincoln as well.

Only Frank “Tick” Coleman, who started as quarterback for the Lincoln Lions from 1931 to 1935, is identified so affectionately.

“When you think of alumni and the person who best represents that Lincoln spirit, that Lincoln sense of integrity, that Lincoln academic acumen—people look at Tick,” says Dr. William Bynum, Lincoln’s vice president for student affairs and enrollment management. “He’s the epitome of what the university stands for, even his long life.”

After 48 years of waiting and being one of the loudest voices for its rebirth, “Mr. Lincoln” will see his alma mater finally revive its football program in a matchup against George Mason University on Aug. 30.

“I am excited,” Coleman says. “This has been a long time coming.”

In 1912 Lincoln was one of the founding members of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA), the nation’s oldest black college conference. It won CIAA championships in 1918, 1919 and 1924. But years later, when it dropped football in 1961, Lincoln lost a part of its luster.

With the revivification of the football program, that luster is already starting to come back. “We knew that bringing back football, the marching band and reuniting with the CIAA that our applicant pool will increase,” Bynum says. “And we’ve seen that happen.”

Much of that momentum is due to Tick Coleman’s tenacity.

That’s exactly how he played football—scoring in a few ticks. He was the first black quarterback at Central High, leading the school to two straight city championships in 1929 and 1930, earning honors on the area’s All-Scholastic team. A lot of the guys at Central went to Lincoln afterward, and Tick followed along, not knowing it would come to play such a prominent role in his life.

Following his graduation from Lincoln in 1935, he worked at number of recreation centers until he landed a job as a counselor with the school district. From 1950 until he retired in 1981, Coleman counseled students who wanted to drop out of school, and encouraged them to get an education. He turned students’ lives around.

In 1981 Coleman went back to his storied alma mater to serve as its director of alumni relations. Even after his tenure in that position ended in 1988, Coleman was still ubiquitous at Lincoln.

Rob Knox, now Lincoln’s assistant athletic director for sports information management, was a student at Lincoln from 1991 to 1996. He remembers Coleman always leading the alma mater at every university function, whether it was a pep rally, a convocation or an assembly.

“If you go to Lincoln, you know Tick Coleman,” Knox says.

“You identify each football program with something or someone whether it’s a current player or the tradition of winning championships or whatever it may be,” Abanishe says. “Right now Tick is our tradition. He has been where we want to go.”

Coleman is currently in the hospital after losing a second leg due to poor circulation. But nothing will keep him from that game and the opportunity to once again give back to his alma mater, he says.

“When I went to Lincoln University, I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have anything,” he says. “And Lincoln provided an education for me for four years. And I always felt that I owed Lincoln. It has done me a great favor, so the only thing I can do is some kind of way pay it back.”