Introducing The Uplantic Professional Football Federation

excerpt from Pastimes: The Beginnings of Pro Sports in Uplantica by Johan Tuwaa, 1998

With the success of professional baseball’s first few seasons in Uplantica, various wealthy athletics enthusiasts launched a handful of upstart leagues in other sports in the early ’30s. Most of these leagues lacked the public interest to go national, and of the dozens of regional pro sports leagues, most folded after a single season or less. Each of the most popular sports had a major league that rose to the forefront of the Uplantic culture. For football, the UPFF was that league.

The UPFF was the brainchild of Catherine Pennington and Giles Lydon, a pair of former history professors-turned-business partners. The two were lifelong close friends and partners, but reportedly never romantically entangled. They were both heavily involved with the University of Harmony athletic club during their teaching careers. After being ousted from their positions in education in 1900 over their controversial support of secular separatists within Tiny Sea City, Pennington and Lydon formed the Tiny Sea Titans athletic club in the spring of 1901. 

The Titans initially operated as a private athletics club, offering gymnasium access, mountain climbing expeditions, and holiday sailing retreats to its wealthy patrons. By the mid-1910s, the club was a cultural mainstay in south Tiny Sea, hosting games between traveling baseball teams and sponsoring local boxing tournaments. The Titans club fielded its own teams in ultimate, cricket, rugby, soccer, and football, which were all rapidly gaining popularity in colleges at the time. The Titans enjoyed a close relationship to the University of Harmony athletics club some years after the forming of the USU, when new leadership at the school turned it into a more secular institution and wiped the slate clean of the bad blood between the university and Lydon/Pennington.

Pennington and Lydon saw the growth of college football competitions over the years, along with the success of professional baseball, and began work in 1930 organizing what would become the UPFF by 1932. They found enough interest to put together a Northern and Southern Conference, each comprising 5 teams. The Northern Conference consisted of already-established athletic clubs similar to the Titans, who now added organized pro football to their programs, hoping it would supplement income from members’ dues and public events. The Southern Conference featured one such established club and 4 brand new franchises put together specifically to participate in the new pro football league. Catherine Pennington was chosen as the first league commissioner and all 10 UPFF teams held a private player draft in the summer of 1932 to compile their rosters from scratch as a requirement for joining the league. This was to ensure as much parity as possible, even between new SC teams and established NC organizations. Some NC teams were hesitant to agree to this, but ultimately all team owners concurred that an even playing field with close competition was in the best interest of the league’s popularity and growth.

Learn about the teams of the UPFF…