Scully Wellness & Recreation Center · architectural rendering
Trinity College
Hartford, Connecticut
Giving a building a soul…and a history.
- Partner
- Trinity College Athletics
- Location
- Hartford, CT
- Scope
- Digital Interactive History
- Sports Covered
- All 28 varsity programs
In the fall of 2022, Trinity College was breaking ground on a new athletic center. The building was largely glass — no room for the usual plaques, trophy cases, or team photos. So they asked a different question: what if the history could come alive instead of just hanging on a wall?
We Found What Was Buried
Trinity had over 600 team photos — spanning from the 1870s to the 1970s — that had been removed from the walls of the athletic center and placed in storage. We digitized every one. We also uncovered an extraordinary cache of photographs at the hockey rink and at the boathouse, football game programs from the 1940s and '50s in the college archives, and other records that hadn't been opened in decades. Working with Trinity's Watkinson Library, we preserved the originals and brought the best of the collection into the platform.
We Rebuilt How Trinity Honors Its Best
Trinity's Hall of Fame was fairly new, only started in 2019. Still, we put it online in a new format: clean navigation, rich profiles, multiple photographs, and — for the first time — the spoken memories of Hall of Fame members themselves. Now, each class can be easily added to the platform.
But we went way beyond the Hall of Fame, chronicling the "great" teams, people, and moments of Trinity's rich, 170-year athletics history.
We Found the Hidden History
Sammy Nakaso '54 had a different path to Trinity College than most of his classmates. A Japanese American from Alameda, California, his family was sent to an internment camp in World War II. He was allowed to leave the camp, only because his older sister was in New Haven, Connecticut 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 to Trinity. Standing just 5'3", Sammy starred on both the basketball and football teams, and intercepted the final pass against Amherst to preserve the great undefeated football team of 1949. He went on to a remarkable career as a beloved educator and coach. Sammy died in 2004, but his daughter had amazing things to say about his time at Trinity and what it meant to him.
We found so many more stories like his. The platform holds profiles of nearly 1,000 remarkable people — not just the stars, but the pioneers, the characters, the people whose lives were quietly shaped by their time at Trinity.
We Captured History Before It Was Gone
Starting with the oldest living graduates — classes of the early 1950s — and working forward, we conducted oral history interviews with 240 former student-athletes and coaches.
The result: over 2,000 curated clips, each one to three minutes long, capturing memories that exist nowhere else. History in the words of the people who lived it.
And something else happened. We called 240 alumni, told them their stories mattered, and listened. Every one of those conversations deepened the connection between that alum and Trinity College. That is advancement work — even when it doesn't look like it.
"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."
We Shared It With the Community
The platform is available online at bantamsportshistory.com and installed on-site at Trinity's new Scully Wellness & Recreation Center — where it lives on touchscreens that any visitor, student, or returning alum can explore.
The best content can now be repurposed for social media, alumni publications, and ongoing outreach — keeping the conversation alive beyond the platform itself. A great story doesn't belong locked in an archive. It belongs in the world.
We Connected History to People
The most powerful thing about great sports history content isn't what it says. It's who it reaches.
A Trinity alumna who played lacrosse in the late '70s might find the 1956 soccer national championship a fascinating tidbit of Trinity athletics lore. But show her a recorded memory from her coach — talking about what it meant to build the women's program from scratch — and you have her full attention, her emotions, and her loyalty.
That's what this work is ultimately about: not preserving the past for its own sake, but connecting people to the moments and stories that defined them.
"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."
A construction fence
The project began with a construction fence. As Trinity broke ground on its new athletic center in 2022, we developed a series of windscreen panels — one for each of Trinity's 28 sports — covering the site during construction. Each panel featured a defining moment in that sport's history and a QR code that linked to a recorded memory from someone who was there.
It was a small thing in the scope of what we ultimately built. But it captured the essence of the work: history, brought to life, in the words of the people who lived it.
You've heard the expression: if these walls could speak.
At Trinity's Scully Wellness & Recreation Center, they do.