2021 Quincy Blue Devil Sports Hall of Fame Inductee: Pomeroy Sinnock, athlete

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The 2020 and 2021 classes are being inducted into the Quincy Blue Devil Sports Hall of Fame together this year. Smith will be inducted on Saturday, Nov. 27 before QHS’s boys basketball game.)

A change in the rules in 1906 was the first step to making the game of American football as popular as it is today, and a Quincy man was one of the first to take advantage of the change. Illegal and experimental forward passes had been attempted as early as 1876, but the forward pass officially became a legal play at the final meeting of the rules committee that was held April 6, 1906.

Football coaching legend Amos Alonzo Stagg said decades later that no particular coach should be credited with being the innovator of the forward pass. He told Allison Danzig of the New York Times in 1952 that Walter Eckersall, his quarterback at the University of Chicago, worked on pass plays in 1906, as did Pomeroy Sinnock of the University of Illinois.

Sinnock graduated from Quincy High School in 1905 and enrolled at the Champaign-Urbana campus on Sept. 9, 1905. He was the quarterback for the Fighting Illini for the 1906, 1907 and 1908 seasons. No statistics are available from those seasons.

Illinois went 1-3-1 in 1906 with Justa Lindgren as coach, then followed with a 3-2 record for Arthur Hall in 1907 and a 5-1-1 record in 1908. Hall coached the Illini for six years before being replaced by legendary coach Robert Zuppke.

Sinnock was a third-team selection in 1908 to the All-American team determined by Dr. Lacy Lockert.

“‘Pom’ is truly a hero — a hero of the football field, and as a gridiron battler ranks with the best in the entire west,” the Quincy Daily Herald reported in 1908. “(Walter) Steffen is touted in Chicago as the greatest of the university quarterbacks, but Sinnock is a close second — a very close second, and there are many who think the Quincy lad is even better than the Maroon star.”

Sinnock graduated from Illinois with a degree in civil engineering on June 16, 1909. Sinnock went on to work in Portland, Ore., first as a purchasing agent for a shipbuilding company and later vice president of a saw mill machinery. He later married Marie Stahl of Quincy in 1924.

The University of Illinois biographical file on Sinnock shows he died on Oct. 17, 1962 in Stockton, Calif. His occupation was listed as “retired contractor.” He was survived by two sons — George Sinnock of Stockton and Pomeroy Sinnock, Jr., of Indiana. Both are now deceased.