Hopkins 1950 Dream Team

Sherwood’s Bunting & Gough

When the Johns Hopkins lacrosse team hammered Maryland, 10-4, in the spring of 1950, the Blue Jays completed an unprecedented four-year, 29-game streak in which they never lost a college game. While that record is legendary, the bond that has been maintained among those players is equally astounding. For more than half a century, the 25 members of the 1950 team have reunited each June to replenish the friendships that have become the most remarkable of their lives.

Many of the players from that team have connections that transcend Hopkins lacrosse. Sherwood’s Lloyd Bunting (#75) and Tommy Gough (#62) have been brothers-in-law since 1950, when Bunting married Gough's younger sister. Bobby Sandell (#44) and Jim Adams (#50) had played lacrosse together since the second grade. "[Many of us] were bitter enemies in high school," says Wilson Fewster (#60), who had played at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. "But people whom I hated in high school became good friends within [the first] days of our freshman year."

The Class of '50 had an immediate impact in 1947: eight classmates started and five of them -- Fewster, Bunting, Gough, Sandell, and Fred Smith (#51) -- were among 12 Blue Jays who were named to the All-America team as Hopkins won its first national title in six years. Combined with some returning veterans -- including Brooke Tunstall, Engr '48, and Ray Greene, A&S '48 -- the team was loaded with talent. "We had some of our best games in practice," says Bunting, recalling the competitive battles for playing time.

By 1950, after three consecutive national titles, that nucleus had evolved into the greatest class Johns Hopkins lacrosse had ever produced. "For me to be playing with these guys, who were heroes, was the thrill of a lifetime," says Bob Scott (#43), A&S '52, one of the few sophomores on the 1950 team. The team attracted huge crowds to Homewood Field: "They used to line three and four deep around Homewood Field," recalls Bill Tanton, A&S '53, senior associate editor at Lacrosse Magazine. "If you were a lacrosse fan, you had to go see Hopkins play."

The team was so good that it could have coached itself. In some cases, it did. Kelso Morrill, a Hopkins math professor who had coached the Blue Jays from 1935 to 1946, returned to the sidelines in Spring 1950 after coach Howdy Myers, the architect of Hopkins' success, went to Hofstra. "[Dr. Morrill] came back with a lot of pressure on him," Fewster says. Those expectations may have contributed to a pesky illness that Morrill battled all season. "I think the strain of the streak got to him before it got to us," says Adams, midfielder and co-captain of the 1950 team. "So we were playing hard for him, too." When Morrill's health kept him from practice, the seniors simply ran the practices themselves.

Not surprisingly, several members of the 1950 team went on to successful coaching careers. "We all loved lacrosse, and [going undefeated at Hopkins] was a high-water mark for a lot of us at that time of our lives," says Adams, who went on to coach at West Point, Penn, and Virginia. Although many of the players remained in the Maryland area after graduation, even those who have moved away make every effort to attend the annual reunion. "My wife says the stories get better and better each year," chuckles Neil Pohlhaus (#42). "I guess we tend to embellish a little."

There's little need to embellish, however, when it comes to the record books. Arguing which was the greatest Hopkins lacrosse team in history may be a futile exercise, but as Robinson Baker (#59), A&S '50, Med '54, host of this year's gathering, says, "We might not have been the best team, but we had the best record." Tanton remembers a lacrosse event where the same subject was discussed. "Some of the younger guys from other great teams were saying, 'You guys were too slow; the game's changed so much since then.' And I remember Neil Pohlhaus said right back at them, 'Well, we stick together better than any other team.' And that's a fact." - Jeff Labrecque