Team photo of 1890 Derby ball club	Will Bryan Born: September 9, 1852 Died: March 27, 1933 Goto Baseball Reference for Will Bryan cf Majors: No
	Sioux City Position: cf First game: July 13, 1888 Last game: July 13, 1888 # of games: 1	Manager for Sioux City who played center field for one game. Bryan was fired August 28, 1888 for refusing to play a game against Milwaukee a few weeks earlier, incurring a fine and loss of the guarentee for the club. SABR biography for Will Bryan

William Cornelius Bryan, Jr. was born on September 9, 1852, in Zanesville, Ohio. He was a minor league player and manager from 1884 to 1888 in the Southern, Northwestern, and Western Leagues, and the Western Association. He was also a war hero, world-class sprinter, a coach and athletic director at various universities, and a promoter of baseball in both the United States and Great Britain. In 1885 he organized the first Southern League. He was later involved in an unsuccessful effort to create a new American Association.

According to the Rockford (Illinois) Republic, Bryan started playing baseball in 1873, and his first professional experience came with Chicago in 1874. Bryan enlisted in the US Army in 1875 in St. Louis. He was assigned as a hospital steward with the Department of Platte and subsequently attached to the Big Horn Expedition, which traveled to the Montana Territories in March 1876. On March 17, 1876, he was involved in the Battle of Powder River. For his actions during this battle, he was awarded a Medal of Honor in 1899. The citation reads:

"Hospital Steward Bryan accompanied a detachment of cavalry in a charge on a village of hostile Indians and fought through the engagements, having his horse killed under him. He continued to fight on foot, and under severe fire and without assistance conveyed two wounded comrades to places of safety, saving them from capture."

By the early 1880s, the family came back east. The Des Moines Register reported that his first year as a manager was in 1882, when he "organized the famous Council Bluffs (Iowa) team, which beat all comers that season." In 1883 Bryan was playing in Omaha, Nebraska, but no box scores have been found to corroborate this. He bounced around the midwest and south through the 1880s, organizing clubs in Omaha (1884), Nashville and Macon (1885), Charleston (1886), and Des Moines (1887). The club he put together in Des Moines in 1887 finished fourth in the Northwestern League, but the core of that club stayed together and won the Western Association Championship in 1888.

By November 1887, Bryan had moved to Hutchinson, Kansas, where his brother Harry lived, to manage a club there in 1888 in the Western League. He reportedly had offers to manage in Montreal (looking to place a club in the International League) and Wilkes-Barre (of the Central League) as well. This season, his final as a ball player, would prove to be another eventful and turbulent year for Bryan. In March he got married. On May 21, 1888, Hutchinson lost a game against Western League rival Leavenworth. The Hutchinson Call reported the next day "The umpire was off in many of his decisions, and the home club suffered thereby. His rulings so incensed Manager Bryan that he acted in a manner that did not receive the approbation of the audience. The directors of the association met this morning, and suspended Mr. Bryan as manager of the club." He was fired less than a week later.

On May 30, 1888, Bryan was appointed to organize a team in Sioux City, which was expected to join the Western League in place of one of the clubs that was expected to collapse.

In early June 1888, Bryan was arrested and taken back to Omaha. "Bryan was held by Justice Wade to the district court on the charge of bastardy, preferred by Nellie Stark, and has been absent from the city several months." Bryan was brought to Omaha to preempt his arrest in Des Moines for seduction. After nearly two weeks in jail, Bryan was released on July 21 "after he atoned with his victim to the satisfaction of all concerned."

Less than one week later, Sioux City was accepted into the Western Association (and not the Western League as originally planned) in place of the St. Louis Whites, who folded on June 24. Sioux City played its first games on July 4, a doubleheader against Des Moines, losing both. By August, Bryan was wearing thin in Sioux City. During a series in Milwaukee, he spent two games complaining about umpire Andy Cusick. He finally refused to play another game with Cusick as umpire, at which point Sioux City forfeited their next game, failed to get the guarantee for the previous two games, and was fined by the Association. The Sioux City board of directors waited another week before firing Bryan and paying him to leave town.

Bryan and his wife headed to St. Louis, where "Mrs. Bryan will receive $30,000 cash at St. Louis and $45,000 worth of property in Illinois." While in St. Louis, Bryan ran several races against H.M. Johnson, the "champion sprinter of the world," losing races of 100 yards and 200 yards and winning a race of 300 yards. He also helped organize "The Professional Athletic Association of America" on October 20, 1888. In December 1888, Bryan and his wife fled to Canada so Bryan could avoid prosecution in Des Moines as the seduction charges there caught up with him again. It would be many years before Bryan would return to the United States.

From 1882 through 1888, Bryan had started at least seven clubs (Council Bluffs, Nashville, Macon, Charleston, Des Moines, Hutchinson, and Sioux City), founded an entire league, was fired from at least four positions, and had multiple interactions with the courts. He was also recognized as a world class sprinter and a first-class organizer of ball clubs. This was just Act I.

After going to Canada in December 1888, Will and Lucy moved to England, where he was hired to manage a club in Derby in the first professional baseball league in England. The man who hired him, Sir Francis Ley, was a wealthy factory owner who learned about baseball during a trip to the Unites States. He realized baseball, requiring only a few hours, would be more accessible to his factory workers than cricket, which could take days. Ley returned home to England, built the Derby Baseball Grounds, and helped form the first professional league in England in 1890, with the support of Albert Spalding. The Derby Grounds were later used by the Derby County F.C. until 1997. The Derby baseball club, formed in 1890, was the top team in England before pressure over the number of Americans on the club caused it to drop from the league. The baseball club lasted until 1898.

Bryan returned to the US in January 1894 to take charge of the track program at the University of Pennsylvania. In his second year running the track program, on April 21, 1895, Harvard defeated the Pennsylvania runners in the 4x440 race in the first ever Penn Relay. In the fall of 1896, he moved to Chicago to run the athletic department at Northwestern University, where he remained until the spring of 1898. He resigned his position there to join a volunteer regiment from Illinois for the Spanish American War. He was given the rank of Captain, and after the war was often referred to as Captain Bryan.

Following the war, Bryan seems to have drifted for a bit. In November 1898, his name was mentioned as a possibility for participation in the American delegation to the Olympics in Paris as "a man… who is thoroughly familiar with amateur sports in this country." In January 1899 he was reported to be heading to England to organize a squad of players to compete against the leading college and athletic clubs in American football. In February 1899, Bryan was granted a franchise in Peoria, Illinois, for the Western Association. The effort collapsed when he was unable to locate a ballpark for the team to play in. After the club in Peoria failed, he was connected with a group in Idaho prospecting for gold representing a syndicate organized by former senator John Thurston of Nebraska. In 1901, he was connected with an attempt to revive the American Association as the representatives for Washington, DC. The nascent league collapsed in late February.

Following this, Bryan went back to Idaho. In June 1902 his group discovered gold in the Stanley Basin. "None of the ore runs less than $200 a ton and much of it is flaked with gold visible to the naked eye and assays as high as $17,000 a ton." Bryan did not get rich from this endeavor. He returned to Washington D. C., where in 1905 he became the track coach at the George Washington Athletic Association. In 1907 he became the Athletic Director for the Colorado School of Mines and helped organize the Colorado State Baseball League. He also served as president of the Rocky Mountain division of the Amateur Athletic Union in 1907 and 1908. He remained with the School of Mines until 1916. From there he moved to California, where he worked at the University of Southern California and then at the University of California, Berkley. While at Berkley, he helped train the "Wonder Teams" under coach Andy Smith in the early 1920s. From 1920 to 1924, the Berkley football team won 44 games with no losses and 4 ties. He moved to the University of Idaho in 1927, where he worked with the track and football programs for two years before returning to California, where his occupation was listed as physical director at a gymnasium in the 1930 US Census.

Will C. Bryan died on March 27, 1933, in Ocean Park, California, at the age of 80. He was survived by his second wife and two daughters (his son Harry having died in 1913). He is buried at Fairmount Cemetery in Denver, Colorado.

Date	Pos	AB	R	BH	2B	3B	HR	SB	PO	A	E	BB	HPB	K
7-13-1888	cf	4	0	0				0	0	1	0
1 Games		4	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	0