The summer that turned Stevens Point into Jacksonville Jaguars territory Tweet

Andrew Goldstein

Sports Anchor/Reporter

agoldstein@wjfw.com





STEVENS POINT - There's no doubt the Green Bay Packers run Wisconsin, but there are exceptions to that rule. In the summer of 1995, the town of Stevens Point briefly threw their support behind a different team, one that hadn't even played a game yet.



"Jacksonville took us by storm," said local fan Tim "Shoe" Sullivan. "They had a lot of fans in Point here."



The NFL announced in 1993 that the Jacksonville Jaguars would be the league's latest expansion franchise.



One of the first orders of business for Inaugural head coach Tom Coughlin: find a site for his team to hold training camp.









"We knew we wanted a summer program at a college where we'd have dorms, fields available and meal service," team executive Michael Huyghue said.



Coughlin found what he was looking for on the UW Stevens Point campus, which was all the better for Sullivan, who was friends with Jaguars' executive John Jones.



"I got a media pass," Shoe said. "That allowed me and whoever I brought with me to go wherever I wanted to go. So it was like player, player, player, Shoe, player. And they're like 'who's this? What am I doing there?'"



While Shoe loitered around the field, groundskeeper Rich Riggs could hardly have been busier, keeping the field up to Coughlin's exacting standards.



"We spent a good deal of time walking around the field, checking the height of the grass," Riggs said. "He wanted the fields all cut at one inch and they were. He wanted to make sure there were no dips, no holes, nothing irregular on the fields."



This was all part of the so-called cheese league, a group of five NFL teams that held training camp around the Badger State.



"It was in Wisconsin so the temperature was perfect, except it ended up being the hottest summer they had in Stevens Point in 15 or 20 years," Huyghue said.



Temperatures approaching 100 degrees had players coping with what the Stevens Point Journal called "sauna-like conditions."



"We always practiced with the pads on," former player Mike Thompson said. "We never took the pads off. Then I don't know who was the genius behind Jacksonville having black helmets. You could actually fry an egg on that thing."



Thompson had just finished his college career with the Wisconsin Badgers and came to the Stevens Point camp as a rookie.



"It was tough to get adjusted to but it was nice to know that if my dad or whoever wanted to come up and watch me, they were less than an hour away," Thompson said.



That peace of mind was in short supply, even among the executives.



"Tom and I as the GM and coach of the team were bunked and there every day," Huyghue said. "Nobody was any different."



For many of the players, the kids that came to watch them became the next best thing to family.



"It's always good to look in a kids' faces and see them smile when you sign autographs," Thompson said. "You hope to make their day."



Stevens Point natives like Shoe embraced them right back.



"When I was with them, they were all treated like gods," Shoe said.



"There had to be (a crowd) five or six people deep surrounding the field and watching it," Riggs said. "So there was a great deal of support."



Those hopes for a second season remained unfulfilled.



The Jaguars moved their camp back to Jacksonville, and no other team has been to Stevens Point since.



"Communities that had NFL teams decided to keep them home," Riggs said. "It just didn't work out to have another team come back up here."



The pictures in Shoe's photo album are among the only mementos left of that long, hot summer.



"Half of Point right now doesn't even know the Jaguars were here," Shoe said.



But anyone who was there will remember those two-a-days like they were yesterday.



"The whole community loved having the Jaguars here," Shoe said. "It was a big feather in our cap."



"I believe a lot of guys as the years go down the road, they'll always remember that time in Stevens Point," Thompson said.

The Jaguars finished 4-12 in their first NFL season after that camp.



Green Bay is now the only training camp in Wisconsin; all the other members of the Cheese League left.



Special thanks to the Jacksonville Jaguars and the UW-Stevens Point library for providing archived materials.













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