Charles Bemies
American sports coach
Charles Otis Bemies (March 19, 1867 – August 10, 1948) was an American football, basketball, and baseball coach and Presbyterian minister. He became acquainted with James Naismith while studying at Springfield College (then known as the International Young Men's Christian Association Training School) in the late 1880s. While serving as the athletic director at Geneva College, he organized the first college basketball team in 1892. He graduated from the Western Theological Seminary and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1897. From 1899 to 1901, he served as the first basketball and second football coach at Michigan Agricultural College (now known as Michigan State University). After retiring from coaching, Bemies served for many years as a Presbyterian minister and evangelist in rural Pennsylvania. He was also active with YMCA, serving with that organization in Russia in 1918 and in South Dakota in the early 1920s. Bemies lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in his later years and died there in 1948. He was posthumously inducted into the Beaver County Hall of Fame in 1992.
Early years
Bemies was born in Vermont in 1867.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charles Bemies” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.