Sport: Swimming
Born: February 24, 1912
Died: September 10, 2004
Town: West Cape May, New Jersey
Sylvius Smothers Moore was born February 24, 1912 in West Cape May, NJ. He was the ninth of 11 children born to Lavinia and William Moore. Fleet of foot, agile and clever, Sylvius excelled at a number of team sports as a boy and was also an excellent wrestler. He packed 170 pounds of muscle onto a compact 5’6” frame. A gifted student, he enrolled at the Hampton Institute in Virginia with an eye on a teaching career.
Sylvius played for the school’s football team while earning degrees in Mathematics and Physical Education. He was a key man on the 1934 Fighting Pirates squad that won the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) championship. In 1934 and 1935, he was the CIAA middleweight wrestling champion. Sylvius lettered in football and track all four years at Hampton, graduating in 1938. During his undergrad years at Hampton, Sylvius worked as the director of a community center in town.
Sylvius received a master’s in Physical Education Administration from NYU, which he put to work as a teacher and coach in the Hampton public school system. His football teams at Phenix High School won state titles in 1941 and 1942. In 1943, after Hampton coach James “Little Train” Griffin went into the service, Sylvius was hired by his alma mater to take over the football team. He filled that role until the end of the war. The team’s star was running back Tom Casey.
In the years that followed, Sylvius coached basketball, wrestling and tennis at Hampton. However, he was best known as a groundbreaking swimming coach. He pioneered the CIAA’s competitive swimming program and assembled the first Hampton swim team in the winter of 1943–44. Sylvius continued to coach swimming until retiring in 1985—leading the team to seven CIAA championships. Among his best swimmers were Gail Bond and Arthur Armstrong.
Sylvius served on the staff of the National Aquatic School and opened the state’s first integrated Learn to Swim program in the 1950s, as well as Virginia’s first integrated AAU swim team in the 1960s. In 1975, Sylvius was named a VP of the Virginia AAU.
Sylvius’s wife, Eleanor, who predeceased him, worked for 37 years at Hampton. Sid Moore, his son, was an outstanding tennis player in the 1960s, winning the Virginia prep singles title. He eventually followed in his father’s footsteps as a college administrator. In 2004, Sylvius passed away at age 92 in Chicago, where his son lived and worked.