Lyal Clark

Who is Lyal Clark?

Lyal W. Clark was an American college football head coach who was Delaware football program's eighteenth head coach. He led them to an 5–18–1 overall record in three seasons.

Born in Nebraska, Clark was a multi-sport star athlete for the Western Maryland College Green Terror, playing as an end in football and coached by Dick Harlow. In 1927 he was invited to play in the East-West Shrine Game. Clark graduated in 1929 with a bachelor of arts degree and took his first coaching job that same year as football line coach at the University of Baltimore. By 1935, when he became head coach at Delaware, he had been an assistant football coach at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Western Maryland, and Delaware.

Following his term as Blue Hen head coach, Clark returned to assistant coaching in 1938, joining the staff of The Harvard Crimson, coached by Harlow. Clark coached at Harvard until 1946, and was a factor in three Harvard victories over Yale University. From March 1943 to November 1945, when Harvard suspended its football program during World War II, Clark served as a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, as an athletic instructor at the Naval Pre-Flight Training Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; at Lakehurst, New Jersey, and at Corpus Christi, Texas. He returned to Harvard at the end of the 1945 season as Harlow's general assistant.