Victory At Virginia Validated JMU Football

And Bridgeforth Stadium, now one of the premier venues in all of FCS, sits on the same spot former JMU president Ron Carrier once sent Prince to run a desperate, impromptu photo shoot.

“Dr. Carrier was such a go-getter,” said Prince, who led defensive backs and eventually running backs, quarterbacks and then the offense for Challace McMillin, the founding father of football at JMU and first coach of the Dukes.

“When we finished that first full year over at [Harrisonburg High School] and we were coming over to build the field on campus,” Prince said, “Dr. Carrier wanted Astroturf before anyone else got it and so he took off to Richmond to lobby to be able to put the field in, but they turned him down.

“He didn’t even come home, but he called right away and told Coach McMillin to have me take the guys out for workouts and have me work them out in the field, which is now where the stadium is. But before it was a gully. And so Dr. Carrier said take ‘em out and they sent the school photographer out and he took slides, but my job was to get those players as filthy and muddy as I could, so we were doing exercises and sprints in ankle-deep mud. But the photographer drove the pictures down after, and the next day Dr. Carrier got the Astroturf approved.”

There were little moments like that along the way that Prince said he can remember laughing about with McMillin, who died this past March, as the original staff labored to progress Madison football forward one step at a time.

Prince said in the early days there was no press box built next to the field, so he had to stand on top of Godwin Hall just to serve as McMillin’s eyes in the sky on game day.

“I had to scream down to the guys on the sideline because I didn’t get quick enough reaction on the phones,” Prince recalled with a chuckle.

While Prince was there, the program graduated from its infancy in Division III to Division II and ultimately to a Division I-AA team with scholarship athletes. Sure, the 1975 season was a thrill while rattling off a 9-0-1 mark and dominating the Virginia Collegiate Athletic Association – what’s now known as the Old Dominion Athletic Conference.

But Prince says there was one victory that validated everything JMU, Carrier, McMillin and company were trying to accomplish.

On Sept. 18, 1982, the Dukes improbably knocked off the University of Virginia, 21-17, in Charlottesville.

“It just legitimized everything that you were,” Gary Michael, the former longtime JMU sports information director, said. “You were only in your fourth year as a scholarship program and still trying to build, but this was now a legitimate program. There was still a long way to go, but you weren’t the Division III team people had seen before.”

Just three seasons earlier in 1979, Virginia crushed JMU, 69-9, and some of the seniors on the ’82 team were freshmen then.

Former Dukes defensive lineman and special teams captain Mike Fornadel said: “I don’t know if anyone thought we could win, but Coach Mac’s whole speech, persona the whole week was ‘Let’s fight ‘em to the very end’ and we did.”

***

Prince said he thought it was key JMU brought positive momentum into its meeting with the Cavaliers.

The week prior to their trip to UVa, the Dukes beat Appalachian State in Harrisonburg, 39-35.

“We scored on the last drive against App State and then we knocked a pass down in the end zone with 10 seconds left to win,” Prince said. “They were a big rival with us because we hated them, and then when we took on Virginia, it was just a big, big thing for us to be able to go over there and try to defend ourselves and not let happen what had happened a couple of years before.”

But in 1979, JMU didn’t have the high-level talent on its roster that it did in 1982 thanks to those players on scholarship filling out the depth chart.

McMillin’s staff recruited wide receiver Gary Clark, defensive end Charles Haley and others who were overlooked by other schools in the state. Clark and Haley developed into NFL draft picks and sustained long pro careers. Clark was a two-time Super Bowl Champion, and Haley was on five teams that won Super Bowls and is a Pro Football Hall of Famer.

And midway through the opening quarter, Clark showcased his speed while hauling in an 80-yard touchdown reception from quarterback Jon Roddy to give the Dukes a 7-3 lead.

“We ran a play-action pass and [Roddy] hit Gary and that started us off,” said Prince, who noted Roddy was only in the lineup because starter Tom Bowles had a suffered a shoulder injury.

“We weren’t going out to Texas or to Florida to recruit,” Prince said, “because you just didn’t know what kids were there. You looked at those guys – and Jon Roddy came from Ohio, but he knew someone at school and he had legs like tree trunks and could run our offense to the T – but Charles and Gary were from Virginia, [running back] Brian Coe was from Lake Taylor and so I’ll always feel that we just did a great job of recruiting the state of Virginia and the border.”

Prince said he thought the difference between JMU and UVa 38 years ago was that the Dukes simply had better players.

JMU added to its edge when senior defensive back Mike Thurman intercepted a pass and returned it 53 yards for a touchdown in the second quarter to quiet the Scott Stadium crowd, which had hoped the Cavaliers would quickly turnaround their squad under first-year coach George Welsh.

“But [Welsh] was just trying to put things together and get organized,” Michael said.

Virginia ended up rallying with rushing touchdowns from quarterback Wayne Schuchts late in the second stanza and running back Antonio Rice early in the fourth quarter to go ahead 17-14.

For the most part, though, the Dukes’ defense led by Haley had done enough to keep the game close. Haley earned Eastern College Athletic Conference Rookie of the Week honors, according to Michael, for his effort against the Cavaliers. Haley had eight total tackles and tallied two sacks in the contest.

The top tackler for the Dukes that day was linebacker Ron Ziolkowski who was in on 14 tackles and recovered two fumbles including one with 9:16 left in the contest that setup JMU’s game-winning drive. Prince said Ziolkowski ripped the ball away from Virginia’s running back to secure the possession and the opportunity for the Dukes to pull ahead.

“Coach Mac just always prepared us the best way he possibly could with the resources he had,” Fornadel said. “… And that’s how we went into that game. We prepared for Virginia just like we prepared for Shippensburg, Appalachian State or Morehead State or one of the teams we played back in the day. We were ready.”

Said Prince: “Got a lot of turnovers that day and that was a major thing. And the longer the game went, the tighter Virginia got because it was that old thing of them looking over their shoulder and not believing that it was happening to ‘em.”

Coe opened the consequent series with a 16-yard run to move JMU into UVa territory and Roddy engineered the rest of the drive and capped it with a 1-yard touchdown run to put JMU in the lead for good.

***

JMU won its next two contests to capture four straight victories before falling to VMI in mid-October of 1982, and in spite of the Dukes losing only once more, a 17-10 setback at Furman, their 8-3 record wasn’t strong enough to reach the I-AA postseason. They had dropped their season-opening contest to New Hampshire before beating Appalachian State.

At that time only 12 schools earned a berth to the playoffs – half of the 24-team field the FCS currently uses – and the Dukes were left out. Furman, which finished 9-3, got in.

“And that was a great college football game,” Prince said about the loss to the Paladins.

Nonetheless, the victory against Virginia never lost its significance.

In JMU’s record book it stands as the Dukes’ first upending of a I-A/FBS opponent, though, Michael said a 1976 win against Davidson is the first because at the time Davidson was a member of the Southern Conference and the Southern Conference didn’t move down from I-A to I-AA until 1982.

Fornadel, a Pennsylvania native, said he went to JMU because the coaching staff sold everything that was possible for the program – things that would occur for the first time while he was in school.

“I wanted to go to Northeastern, and I had narrowed it down to Northeastern, Kent State and Ohio University,” said Fornadel, the brother of another former member of the Dukes, Paul Fornadel, and uncle of the team’s current starting right tackle Liam Fornadel.

“Then JMU came in and said you could be part of something new,” Mike Fornadel said. “And that’s how I got there. It’s because I thought, ‘Wow, I’m part of a program that’s only a few years old and that there were going to be a lot of firsts.’ I thought the chance to make history as a young kid was cool. We beat UVa, and we went down we beat App State at App State in ’83.”

And after beating Virginia, Prince said, JMU’s coaching staff had something tangible to tell recruits about and it only improved the recruiting efforts.

“The big thing it did was it opened up the door for the next year to be able to go after some other recruits we normally didn’t go after,” Prince said, “and hand-in-hand the basketball team was tremendous. We were having great recruiting years – and when recruiting went on, they were in the NCAA [tournament] back-to-back-to-back years – and here we are having recruits into school in January and February, and we take ‘em into Godwin [Hall] and you can’t move in there because there’s so many people.”

But that 1982 season was as close as the Dukes got to the postseason under McMillin. After the 1984 campaign, he was relieved of his duties as coach.

The school hired Joe Purzycki, a former assistant of Tubby Raymond’s at Delaware, and Purzycki kept Prince on the football staff at JMU. Prince said he stayed on board through 1987. Since then, he’s run his own high school programs, spending 14 years at the helm of Ocean Lakes (Virginia Beach) and the last 13 years as coach at First Flight High School in Kill Devils Hill, N.C. In total, this year is his 49th overall in coaching.

“When I first went to high school coaching, I didn’t get back at all [to JMU],” Prince said. “I didn’t like it. I could still remember listening on the radio to the first JMU game I ever missed when I was in Virginia Beach and I just balled. I missed it so much, but now I go back for the golf tournament and I went back for Coach McMillin’s memorial. But for about seven or eight years I didn’t go back. I started with the golf tournament and then because we played all the way through the season, I’d come for the last [JMU] game of the year.”

He said it’s unfathomable to have lived and worked through where JMU’s football program started and compare it to where it’s at now – two national championships, many more conference titles and six wins over I-A/FBS opponents later.

“They never blinked,” Prince said. “You always had those naysayers that said it couldn’t be done there, and now you walk into that place and take a look. It’s amazing.”

Editor's Note: This is the third story in a Flashback Friday series detailing the wins in JMU program history against the FBS. These stories will run each Friday over the next few weeks.