When the first HBCU to win a Division I championship was stripped of their title, Howard University’s multi-national barrier-breakers made history all over again
The way coach Lincoln ‘Tiger’ Phillips recalls it, there was not much point in playing one period of overtime to decide the 1974 NCAA men’s soccer championship, let alone four – though, that’s what it eventually took for his Howard University Bison to defeat Saint Louis University Billikens, 2-1, and claim the national championship for the only time in the school’s history. Why? Because fate, Phillips recently told the Guardian, had already decided the outcome of the match long before a ball was even kicked on that freezing cold December day 42 years ago this week, when conditions delayed kickoff and snow had to be piled up behind the goals at Busch Memorial Stadium in St Louis.
Phillips’ belief stemmed from the fact that the “only time in its history” part of his and Howard’s story – which saw the school become the first historically black college or university to win a Division I national championship – was not entirely accurate. Though the record books currently show the university’s men’s soccer team with one title to its name (1974), the school and Phillips had experienced such a success story before; it was the basis for the coach’s fate-based-on-fact approach, paired with a sense of redemption that ran through a squad whose stories stretched from Africa to the Caribbean to Washington DC.
Related: The long decline of Haskell Indian Nations University's all-conquering football team
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