The Michigan Wolverines’ football moment on roller skates

Long before anyone staged a roller soccer World Cup, football on skates was already a thing … and the Michigan Wolverines played it.

As I was doing research for the most obscure Big Ten football opponents of all time, I came across the story of Michigan's roller football moment. Going down the rabbit hole, I even involved Michigan's library to help me find out what I could.

So, what do we know about roller football and Michigan's involvement?

The Michigan Wolverines and roller football

One Friday night in the spring of 1885 (the date is a point of contention), Michigan's football team laced up roller skates at Ann Arbor's Palace Rink and took on a Detroit side called the Princess. Michigan won, in the words of "The Argonaut," "in two straight innings." And then the game vanished from history. It never made Michigan's official record book, and for more than 140 years it survived as a single sentence in a student newspaper.

That sentence is the whole joke and the whole point as well. The game was real, but nobody treated it as real football. It was a spring exhibition on a rink floor played while the varsity season was months away, and the record-keepers simply never counted it. Why? A spring night on skates didn’t seem to look like football to the people keeping the books.

For this one moment in time, there is no official record of a roster, crowd size or even how the scoring actually happened. It’s just a Friday night, a rink and a result.

But Michigan wasn’t an outlier. The Wolverines were actually right on time. Roller skating was the great craze of the mid-1880s. Rinks were opening in every town, and rink managers needed attractions to fill them. Football on skates was one of them.

A match between Derby and Burton was reported in England as early as January 1882. By March 1885, the same month Michigan was practicing on rollers, a newspaper in New Haven noted the new fad in New England rinks.

The game kept popping up wherever wheels met grass games. By 1894, London had a skating football champion, the Lambeth club. In 1907, a Honolulu newspaper printed a full rulebook for the six-a-side version: three linemen, three backs, 10 yards in four downs and goalposts stuck in barrels. Detroit, of all places, saw a roller-soccer revival in 1949. And in 1995, a San Francisco skater named Zack Phillips kicked a ball across a rink and accidentally reinvented the whole thing as modern roller soccer.

So, Michigan's forgotten Friday night in 1885 wasn’t a fluke. It was an early chapter in a sport that never quite died. It just kept rolling (pardon the pun) back around every few decades, waiting for someone to notice.

Michigan noticed first, won in two straight innings and then forgot all about it. Somewhere, the Princess team is still waiting for a rematch from the Wolverines. Maybe Rich Rodriguez should have obliged.