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DAVIS, Calif. - It's been almost 60 years since a UC Davis football team — once the laughingstock of the old Far Western Conference — went from the abyss to the pinnacle in four short seasons.

Those Aggies, coached by the late campus icon Will Lotter, will be back in force this weekend. Almost 20 of those players who soldiered on after an 0-8-1 freshman campaign in 1960 will be on hand Saturday when the current Aggies meet Lehigh at UC Davis Health Stadium.

It will be a bittersweet visit as those gathered will say goodbye to their coach, the late Lotter, in a public remembrance of life on Sunday (2 p.m. at the ARC Ballroom).

But first, the old stories will get a trial run at a Saturday reception in the Schaal Aquatics Center before the non-conference showdown with the Mountain Hawks.

Going from the worst record in UC Davis football history to what many of these Old Guard Aggies call the beginning of Aggie Pride is worth a bright spotlight.

After going 0-for-1960, those freshmen — and a group of special recruits up from Santa Ana — began to evolve under Lotter.

Back-to-back 5-4 records followed before the locals went 6-2-1 and 3-1-1 in Far Western play. (FYI: That tie came against San Francisco State, which had an assistant coach named Jim Sochor.)

But it was a 1961 victory over a cock-sure Nevada squad that still fires up these ground-breaking Blue-and-Gold gridiron giants.

"The newspapers in Reno were calling us 'doormats,' " remembers one-time defensive back Gary Carlson, a professor emeritus at the School of Veterinary Medicine. "It didn't sit well with any of us."

Lotter, who died in May, used that Reno Gazette article as bulletin-board material to stoke his team's fire.

During a Friday team meal before meeting powerful Nevada, Lotter unveiled the article to his emerging brethren. The next day, Aggie Pride rang out loud and proud: UC Davis 36, Nevada 12.

Reported The California Aggie, "The doormat of the league, UC Davis ... tore into the fragile Nevada line for 261 yards rushing while passing for 121 to run the Wolf Pack into the turf, off the field, and back to their slot machines."

It was Davis that won the jackpot that weekend.

"We used to say that, yes, it was the start of Aggie Pride," former Davis head coach (1989-1992) and '60 running back Bob Foster once told me. "You have to be able to have (Aggie Pride) when you're down and out, face in the mud."

Foster, who became an assistant coach on the title-winning 1963 team, tried to put into perspective the sense of accomplishment and pride that came with the transition from worst to first.

Dick Carriere, the quarterback and one of the driving forces of the 1963 team, weighed in on that championship season:

"My top memory of the championship has to be the victory over Sacrament State," the Northern California resident told The Davis Enterprise. "Some of us had been together (since the worst season on record). You can see how special winning the Far Western was for us.

"Because we had been together for so long, we had formed a special bond. It's been more like family."

Many of those pioneering Aggies will be on hand Saturday. Fans attending the Lehigh game will get a chance to see Carlson, Carriere, Dan Aldrich, Max Miller, Ron Conway, Foster and others as the team is honored on the field.

But the real hoot comes in talking to these guys. Find one of them in the stands and spend some time chatting about the old days.

For example, there was Jim Clay, an undersized lineman who, according to the late Jack DeWit, "played his tail off."

Foster remembers one time Clay came back to the huddle, "mud all over him, his helmet turned sideways on his head. ... Looking through his ear hole he says, 'Come my way next time. I have a pigeon.' "

Even without a win, the spirit never died. Even critics were won over.

John Chase was an Aggie cheerleader who seemed particularly cynical of those 1960 "losers."

Foster and his pals didn't take kindly to the snide asides, but they used friendly persuasion to silence the chatter.

"So you think you can do better?" came Lotter's question to Chase.

Apparently the answer was "yes."

"Before the season ended he went from cheerleader to starting center," Foster said with a hearty laugh. "We took him right off his milk can."

But it was Lotter who galvanized these early Aggies.

"Will was a wonderful football coach, always concerned about his players and the way the game was played," explains Mike Doyle, a two-way standout for UC Davis. "Yet my fondest memory of him has nothing to do with football."

After graduating from Davis, Doyle and his wife Sue moved to Berkeley where he attended Cal's law school.

"In 1968, (at an anti-war) peace march through the streets of San Francisco ... we're weren't more than a couple of blocks into the march, when who should I see walking almost beside us?" asks Doyle. "You guessed it — it was Will Lotter and his wife, Jane. I caught his eye and we had a few very pleasant words. What a day!"

A peaceful warrior, Will Lotter.

In his decades-long tenure at UC Davis, Lotter coached baseball, men's tennis and soccer, track and field as well as football.

Born in 1924 in Alameda, Lotter was a fighter pilot in the Navy during World War II. He then attended Cal, where he played baseball and football. Upon graduation, he joined the UC Davis faculty in 1952 while continuing his education, earning a master's in education at Sacramento State and a doctorate in education at Cal.

Lotter's amazing journey continued in the late 1960s as deputy director of the Peace Corps in Malawi and training manager for the corps' Nepal programs. Lotter has been accorded many honors over the years, but one of his most prideful moments came when he was inducted into the Cal Aggies Athletics Hall of Fame in 2004.

So, Aggie fans, it seems like it's turned into Old Home Week in Davis as that storied 1960s team comes together to revisit The Transformation while the community gathers to pay tribute to a man for the ages.

Oh yeah, and all the while the 2019 UC Davis Aggies continue their march toward another special season, a season clearly built on the shoulders of those who came before.

— Reach Bruce Gallaudet at bgallaudet41@gmail.com or 530-320-4456.


Editor's note: One of the most well-known and respected sports writers in the industry, former Davis Enterprise sports and managing editor Bruce Gallaudet joined the UC Davis Athletics staff as its feature writer in the summer of 2018. Since then, visitors to UCDavisAggies.com have enjoyed his unique perspective on campus student-athletes, coaches, teams, individuals, programs, events and projects that represent the fifth-ranked public school in the nation.