The Warhawks are from Wisconsin, and the fans that made it to Stagg Bowl XXXVII were hardly bothered by a little snow. Photo by Dan Poel, d3photography.com

By Patrick Coleman
D3sports.com

As I recall, the phone rang at 5:18 in the morning.

It was Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009, and Carey Harveycutter, the director of facilities for the City of Salem, was calling to tell me that Stagg Bowl XXXVII, the fifth of many between Mount Union and UW-Whitewater, was going to be delayed.

Having had an account on the social media network formerly known as Twitter, my first reaction was to send a tweet.

STAGG BOWL KICKOFF PUSHED BACK TO 1600 ET. More details to come. #d3fb #stagg

— D3football.com (@d3football) December 19, 2009

There wasn't exactly a lot of engagement on the platform 14 years ago, two hours before dawn, as you can see.

Snow had started to fall about 2:30 the previous afternoon. As of about 1:15 in the morning, we had seven inches. It was a foot by the time my phone rang. Eventually, it was 19 inches of snow.

While I was comfortably lying in bed and tweeting, then writing, hundreds of people were preparing to clear the roads, the parking lot, the seats and the playing surface, in the hopes of making the Stagg Bowl, which had been scheduled for 11 a.m. on ESPN2, playable by the 4 p.m. time slot on ESPN Classic.

Everyone pitched in in terms of shoveling, including Shonna Brown, the NCAA’s liaison in charge of the championship, the members of the committee, and Salem city staff and volunteers. By the time the gates opened, you’d hardly have noticed there was ever an issue, aside from about a quarter of each side of the stadium where the seating wasn’t cleared because it wasn’t needed.

By the time Whitewater quarterback Jeff Donovan threw the first pass of the game, the Wisconsin native, called the conditions “perfect.” And the Warhawks went on to win the game, 38-28.

Meanwhile, the UW-Whitewater fan bus which carried the university’s marching band never made it to Salem. It turned around and fans watched the game from a Buffalo Wild Wings in West Lafayette, Indiana. 

Many others never made it in, either. D3sports.com’s Gordon Mann got stuck on the interstate for hours and eventually got into Salem right around kickoff, and went straight to the hotel room to sleep.

Mann didn’t come to another Stagg Bowl until it was in Annapolis, a little closer to home.