You're sitting on a treasure trove. We help you unlock it.
Every college has a remarkable sports history — rich with great athletes, great teams, and stories that span generations. Most of it is buried.
Photos locked away in filing cabinets. Stories living only in the memories of alumni who won't be around forever. A Hall of Fame that nobody visits.
College Sports History LLC helps colleges unlock that history — and put it to work driving alumni engagement, institutional pride, and a deeper connection between the college and the people whose lives it shaped.
Unlocking Your Sports Legacy
We've developed a six-step framework — Unlocking Your Sports Legacy — that transforms dormant history into something a college can actually use.
Capture & Preserve
We find what exists: team photos in closets, artifacts in storage rooms, records that have never been digitized. We organize and preserve it before it's lost forever.
Celebrate & Honor
We build or rebuild your Hall of Fame and recognition platforms — online, physical, and digital — so your great athletes and teams receive the recognition they deserve.
Uncover the Stories
Beyond the stats and the records, every program has hidden stories. We dig them out. The civil war hero who rowed for his college in the 1860s. The Japanese American who went from an internment camp to the football field. These are the stories that stay with people.
Capture Living History
We conduct oral history interviews with former athletes and coaches — capturing memories that exist nowhere else and cannot be recreated once they're gone. The result is irreplaceable: history in the words of the people who lived it.
Share & Activate
Great content doesn't find its audience on its own. We help schools bring their history into the world — through a digital interactive platform, social media, alumni publications, and physical spaces that give the past a place to live.
Connect & Engage
The right story, in the right hands, at the right moment, changes something. We help schools use their history to reach the people who care most about it — and to make that connection feel personal, because it is.
It's the Stories, Not the Stats
Sammy Nakaso '54 had a different path to Trinity than most of his classmates. A Japanese American from Alameda, California, his family was sent to an internment camp during World War II. He was allowed to leave only because his older sister was in New Haven teaching Japanese to Yale intelligence officers. Sammy went to Hillhouse High School — where he was teammates with Levi Jackson, Yale's first Black football captain — and then on to Trinity.
Standing just 5'3", Sammy starred on both the basketball and football teams, and intercepted the final pass against Amherst to preserve Trinity's undefeated football season of 1949. He went on to a remarkable career as a beloved educator and coach. Sammy passed away in 2004, but his daughter had extraordinary things to say about his time at Trinity and what it meant to him.
That story doesn't live in any database. It lives in the archive, in the memories of people who knew him, in the kind of patient research that most colleges don't have the time or expertise to do.
We found fifty more stories like his at Trinity alone. Every college has them.
"Such a fantastic project... It was so much fun to scroll through memory lane. Many of my connections were through the teams that I was on rather than class years. This brought so much back! Many, many thanks for a job most well done!"
"What an outstanding job constructing this great history of Trinity athletics. To see the faces and accomplishments of so many is so inspiring and keeps me closely connected to our Trinity College legacy...it is just wonderful, and I am so thankful that you included me as part of the glorious history of Trinity athletics."
"What fun and a great way to reconnect classmates and friends through Great People, Great Teams, and Great Moments. A priceless gift!"
"I chaired the Annual Fund at Trinity for two years. Called on many substantial donors. We shared all the tax benefits. Talked about what was going on at the school. Interestingly, this conversation had little impact on the donor's potential to contribute. What did have impact? Sharing memories and experiences that paralleled the donor's time at the college. It was this emotional connection that closed the deal. Almost every time."
Beyond Athletics
The stories we find don't stay in the sports world. They tell the story of the college itself — where students came from, what the college gave them, and what they went on to do. These are stories about people, not just athletes. And they speak to anyone who cares about what a college education can do for a life.
Why the Weekly Stories
The blog you're reading is part of the work, not separate from it. Every week we publish one piece from the broader history of college sports — the seasons that weren't, the athletes you never heard of, the games only the radio remembers.
It's our way of showing — not telling — what we do. If a story moves you, we'd love to find one like it at your school.
My Story
A math-science kid from a small high school in the Midwest, I was on my way to the University of Illinois to study civil engineering before I got recruited to play football in the Ivy League. Four years at Yale changed everything. I discovered a passion for the liberal arts — and for history in particular. I wrote a history of Yale football for the yearbook and never looked back.
After graduation I worked as a freelance journalist and started taking on corporate history projects to pay the bills. Those projects sparked something unexpected: a genuine interest in business. I spent the next 25 years working with technology-enabled companies, never entirely leaving history behind but not making it the center of things either.
Then I came back. It started with a book — Brothers in Arms: Remembering Brothers Buried Side by Side in American World War II Cemeteries (2020) — which took me across the country to meet surviving family members, collect photographs and artifacts, and recover stories that were slipping out of reach. That project reminded me what I'd always known: that finding and telling stories is the work I was built for.
From there I took on history projects for families, corporations, and nonprofits — each one different in subject, but consistent in approach: dig deep, find what's been forgotten, and bring it back to life through whatever form of media serves the story best.
The Trinity College athletics history project was the natural next step — and the one that showed me what this work could look like at scale. Three years, 240 interviews, decades of forgotten stories. It turned out that the most interesting thing about a college's athletics history is rarely the wins and losses. It's the lives.
That's what College Sports History is built on. The belief that every program has a story worth finding — and that finding it changes something.
If you think your school has stories worth finding — let's talk.
One great story. Every Friday.
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