Background
Yost was born on April 30, 1871 in Fairview, West Virginia, the oldest of the four children of Permenus Wesley Yost and Elzena Jane (Ammons) Yost. His father, a farmer, came of a family that had settled in West Virginia about 1825.
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coach Football player college athletics administrator
Yost was born on April 30, 1871 in Fairview, West Virginia, the oldest of the four children of Permenus Wesley Yost and Elzena Jane (Ammons) Yost. His father, a farmer, came of a family that had settled in West Virginia about 1825.
Fielding attended local schools, and during his teens worked as a deputy marshal in Fairview. After a short course at the Fairmont (West Virginia) Normal School, he taught school for a year (1889-1890) in Patterson Creek, West Virginia, and then enrolled in Ohio Normal University (later Ohio Northern) in Ada. He left after three years, however, before completing the course, and returned to Fairview to work in the West Virginia oil fields. Attracted by the lucrative possibilities of practicing petroleum law, he entered West Virginia University in 1895 and two years later received the LL. B. degree.
Yost had enjoyed playing the newly developing game of football in Ohio, and at West Virginia he was for two years a member of the university's intercollegiate team. After graduating he accepted the post of football coach at Ohio Wesleyan University. This was the first in a series of such positions that took him to the University of Nebraska (1898), the University of Kansas (1899), and Stanford (1900); at each he led the football team to a conference championship. Yost's success, coupled with his assiduous courting of officials at the University of Michigan, resulted in his call to Ann Arbor in 1901. He remained at Michigan for the rest of his career, as head football coach (1901-1923 and 1925-1927) and as director of intercollegiate athletics (1921-1941).
Yost was one of the earliest members of the "profession" of intercollegiate football coach, and one of the most successful. His Michigan teams compiled a record of 165 games won, twenty-nine lost, and eleven tied. They were undefeated for eight seasons, and eight times they won the championship of the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, commonly called the Western Conference or the "Big Ten. " Yost's "point-a-minute" teams of 1901-1905 were the most remarkable, averaging 49. 8 points per game to 0. 7 points for their opponents in the fifty-five games played. An athletic entrepreneur rather than a gridiron theoretician, Yost based his success primarily upon his abilities at personnel recruitment and management. As early as 1905, he referred appropriately to his team as his "beautiful machine. " His habit of requiring swift execution of his plays on the practice field earned him the nickname "Hurry-up. "
Yost was a precursor of the superb managers Percy Haughton at Harvard and Knute Rockne at Notre Dame rather than the creative peer of Amos Alonzo Stagg, Henry L. Williams, or Glenn S. Warner. Until 1921 Yost worked only during the ten-week football season, for which he was paid more than the annual salary of a full professor. This left the rest of the year free for an active business career. Yost sought out natural resource deposits for development companies, sold oil and gas leases, and supervised the construction of a hydroelectric project in Tennessee (1907-1914). So lucrative were these ventures that he was loath to give them up when in 1906 the Intercollegiate Conference resolved that coaches in member schools should have full-time academic appointments. Michigan stood by its coach, and after two years of debate left the conference, remaining out until 1917. The controversy continued, however, and in 1921 Yost's position at Michigan was finally legitimized with his appointment as director of intercollegiate athletics; two years later he was also named professor of the theory and practice of athletic coaching in the School of Education.
Yost's new duties involved him in a wide range of activities, including the development of athletic curricula and the construction of such facilities as a new stadium and the Yost Field House; as a result, he gave up coaching the football team after 1927. All told, he built at Ann Arbor the largest collegiate athletic enterprise in America. The place and style of the early twentiethcentury football coach on the American campus was not unlike that of the nineteenth-century college chaplain. In 1946, five years after his retirement at the age of seventy, he died in Ann Arbor of a gallbladder condition. He was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery, Ann Arbor.
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Yost opposed smoking, drinking, and swearing. Tall and ruddy, abstemious, garrulous, with a self-help anecdote always at hand, he was a personification of the self-made man.
Yost married Eunice Josephine Fite on March 12, 1906; they had one child, Fielding Harris.
