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Vince McMahon, IVCC
Vince McMahon
ILLINOIS VALLEY COMMUNITY COLLEGE
SUBMITTED PHOTOS
Accomplishments
● Legendary football coach during the late 1970s to the early 1990s ● Had a career record of 112-52 including 15 straight winning seasons, his teams appeared in five Midwest Bowls and won four ● His 1979 IVCC team finished 11-0 and placed third in the
NJCAA Poll, team was a Class of 2019 inductee into the NT
IV Sports Hall of Fame ● Member of the IVCC Hall of
Fame (individual, 1976 team and 1979 team), NJCAA
Football Coaches Hall of
Fame and NJCAA Region IV
Hall of Fame and now two time-member of the NT IV
Sports HOF ● Wrote two books on the game: Coaching the No-
Huddle Multiple Offense and
Coaching the Option Wing
Offense
By Andy Tavegia
It didn’t take long for Vince McMahon to realize what he may have gotten himself into.
A former assistant coach on his first head coaching gig, McMahon was charged with running the Illinois Valley Community College football program – a program that hadn’t had a full-time leader since its return just a few years prior.
However, on one of his first in-district recruiting visits, he heard the doubts. “I remember I was recruiting at Hall, and I heard one kid say to another, ‘That’s the last place in the world I would ever go,’” McMahon said. But as they say, if you build it, they will come. And what McMaWHERE are theyhon built was a program that – based on mostly in-district talent – won 68 percent of its 164 games over his 16-year period. As time went on, it became easier and easier for McMahon to draw players from the Illinois Valley – an area with multiple NOW strong prep programs – to play for IVCC.
It all started with his second recruiting class.
Coming off a 2-7 season in 1975, he managed to convince a small but talented recruiting class to play at IVCC. Despite having just 32 players on the total roster, the Apaches went 6-3 that year and 7-2 the next with a Midwest Bowl appearance.
It was the beginning of 15 consecutive winning seasons for the IVCC program.
“It was the process of having to build a program pretty much from the ground up,” McMahon said. “There wasn’t anything there (when I arrived). I’ve always said you don’t get good jobs normally. There’s a reason you get them. And so, it was a process of building. I was fortunate that in my second year there were some pretty good kids. That was the foundation, that second year. We started winning after that. It’s just the process of building it.”
McMahon said drawing the talent to the team and fans to the stands got easier along the way and hit its zenith just a few years later.
That’s when the 1979 team went 11-0 and climbed as high as No. 3 in the national rankings. That team, which packed Howard Fellows Stadium on a weekly basis, was inducted into the NewsTribune’s IV Sports Hall of Fame in 2019.
Kurt Bruno was a member of that team. He said McMahon’s ability to push the right buttons and run his wing-T with such efficiency were the differences not only that season but later on when Bruno joined McMahon’s coaching staff.
There might have been no better example than the final game of the regular season.
Down going into halftime on the road at Triton, McMahon delivered a halftime speech Bruno has not forgotten to this day.
“Coach comes onto the bus, and he says, ‘Hey fellas, you had a good season. You played your guts out today. This is up to you guys. If you want to go to a bowl game, this is up to you,’” Bruno said. “That’s what he said, and I am not exaggerating when I say we literally broke the doors on the bus getting out. We ended up coming back and beating them by two touchdowns.
“He was just a great motivator. He knew his guys and he knew the right buttons to push. And he was just a good man. He would run through the wall for the guys.”
McMahon would use those same motivators when recruiting players from around an Illinois Valley area, which was extremely talented at the time.
La Salle-Peru was in the midst of four playoff appearances in five years, three of which ended with state runner-up finishes. Marquette was a powerful program in the early 1980s with a state runner-up finish, while Ottawa had winning records throughout the late 1970s and early 80s.
“The one thing I thought about the Illinois Valley when I came there was that there were a lot of tough kids in the Valley at that time,” McMahon said. “That’s what we tried to be. We tried to be as physical as possible and just outhit people. And there were enough of those kids that really made that work.”
Bruno said that much was obvious in practices and with his trust in his heralded wing-T offensive approach. It’s an offense so successful that McMahon has since written a book on the subject.
“He was confident enough in his teachings during practices during the week that he could give (his offensive linemen) that latitude to call their own blocks,” Bruno said. “He was an innovator with things like that.”
IVCC CELEBRATES COACH VINCE MCMAHON IVCC CELEBRATES COACH VINCE MCMAHON
• IVCC head football coach 1975-1991 • Appeared in five Midwest Bowls, winning four • Undefeated 1979 team finished third in NJCAA • 15-straight winning seasons • 5-time N4C Coach of the Year,
IVCC Hall of Fame 2016
