“It couldn’t have happened without Mike Kelly,” said Roy Flynn, who teaches in UD’s communication department and produced The Legacy of Success: The History of Dayton Flyers Football.
He could have been talking of the Flyers’ successful football history. Kelly did coach the Flyers to almost double the number of wins as the next most successful coach. Kelly won 246; Harry Baujan, 124. (And Kelly had fewer losses, 54, compared to Baujan’s 64.)
That’s all true, but the antecedent of Flynn’s “it” referred to the documentary. One day in 1977 Kelly, then UD’s defensive coordinator, noticed people cleaning out a storage room, tossing stuff into a truck to take to the dump. He realized among the refuse was film, old football film. Kelly took possession of it.
Without that film, Flynn’s documentary would have little about the early golden days of Flyer football. This August, UD released the 43-minute Legacy documentary produced by Flynn, assisted by a number of UD students and edited by Greg Kennedy ’19, who also teaches in the communication
department.
The modern era of UD football began in 1923 with Harry Baujan beginning his career as head coach, which lasted through World War II. The documentary traces the program through its Division I years to non-scholarship Division III to its now Division I Football Championship status, from Baujan to current coach Trevor Andrews ’98 with deep looks at the tenures of College Football Hall of Famer Kelly and of Rick Chamberlin ’80, who was at UD 43 years (14 as head coach, preceded by those as a player, grad assistant, linebackers coach and defensive coordinator).
“The earliest film ... was from 1934, though some of it had turned to dust.”
Flynn’s crew worked on digitizing the film, using a machine more than half a century old itself, until one day, Flynn said, “the unit smoked and smelled, and that ended it.” He’s looking for an economical way to digitize some remaining football film as well as some basketball footage, including what might be a film of the first game in UD Arena.