Today, Dayton is a great sports town for college basketball, minor league baseball, and much more. But despite the many passionate fans in the Gem City, establishing a team in one of the major professional leagues isn’t a realistic possibility. But Dayton will always have a special place in the history of the NFL, as it holds the distinction of hosting the very first league game on October 3, 1920 at Triangle Park.
The roots of Dayton’s pro football team, the Triangles, go back to 1912 at St. Mary’s College, today the University of Dayton. A club basketball team called the St. Mary’s Cadets made up of alumni and other local players enjoyed some success, and formed a football team under the same name for the Fall 1913 season. That team would win the Dayton City Championship three years in a row and also beat the Cincinnati Celts 27-0 to win a Southern Ohio Championship.
But the team that would make NFL history came about through the efforts of prominent Dayton industrialists Edward Deeds and Charles Kettering. In 1916, the Cadets team was reorganized to help provide a recreational outlet for employees at three downtown Dayton companies founded by the duo: Delco, Dayton Metal Products Company, and the Domestic Engineering Company (Delco Light).
These companies formed an “industrial triangle of plants in downtown Dayton.” Around the same time Deeds and Kettering purchased a large plot of land north of downtown that itself was triangular in shape, which was given the name of Triangle Park.
Carl Storck, a Cadets player and foreman at NCR who would later serve as secretary-treasurer of the NFL, helped establish the new team, “the nucleus of which was the Cadets,” with employees from the three factories rounding out the roster.
Its first season was a success, as the Dayton Triangles went 9-1 including victories over teams from Cincinnati, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. Dayton would win an Ohio League Championship after an undefeated 1918 season.
Dayton and the Formation of the NFL
In August and September 1920, Storck represented the Triangles at the meetings held at Ralph Hay’s Hupmobile dealership in Canton which would establish the American Professional Football Association (APFA), which would change its name to the National Football League (NFL) in 1922.
The famous inaugural game of the league at Triangle Park was a 14-0 Dayton win over the Columbus Panhandles. Lou Partlow scored the league’s first touchdown.
The teams’ inaugural season was a success, with the Triangles finishing with a 5-2-2 record.
Dayton Triangles – The Later Years
But the years after that would prove to be much more of a struggle for Dayton. The Triangles remained a team made up of locals while other NFL teams like Curly Lambeau’s Green Bay Packers began adding the best college players from all around the country.
The team’s 4-3-1 finish in 1922 was the last time the Triangles would post a winning record, and they would win only 5 more games in their remaining 8 seasons, including just 2 victories from 1925-1929.
By that point crowds had dwindled at Triangle Park, which could hold 5,000 fans, leading the team to play primarily on the road where monetary guarantees far exceeding what they could earn at home helped keep the team in business.
In 1930, the situation became untenable and the team was moved to Brooklyn to become the Brooklyn Dodgers. After several more moves, the then New York Yanks were given to an ownership group in Texas to become the Dallas Texans in 1952. One year later that team became the Baltimore Colts, which moved to Indianapolis in 1984.
Historic Triangle Park Today
As for the NFL stadium that witnessed history, the part of Triangle Park that held the football stadium later became the baseball diamond Howell Field.
The old locker rooms remained for decades and were being used for storage when they were moved to Carillon Park in 2012.
The NFL does not recognize a connection between the Colts and the Triangles. But in 2019, in advance of the celebration of the league’s 100-year anniversary, it honored Dayton’s foundational role and pledged to fund a new artificial turf field at Triangle Park.
But concerns were raised over the site’s past as a Native American burial ground, and after some investigation and a survey, plans for the new field were scrapped. The NFL did build a new turf field the following year at nearby Kettering Field.
Also in the last few years, Allen Farst wrote and directed a documentary film called Triangle Park featuring major NFL names such as Cris Collinsworth, Larry Fitzgerald, Eric Dickerson, Kirk Herbstreit, Sean McVay, Troy Aikman, and many more to tell the story of the historic game in Dayton. There were screenings at the local Neon Movie Theater and at AMC theaters in every NFL market, but a digital release on Amazon Prime has been postponed while the team reviews a new potential deal for longer-term stability for the film.
Additional Sources
“DAYTON PLAYED LARGE FOUNDING ROLE IN NFL,” Collett and Presar
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