Furman Engaged lets students showcase their work telling Furman’s history

When Jeff McLane ’26 started his research into the history of Furman Soccer, he had no idea he would make a discovery that shifted our understanding of the sport’s earliest days.

McLane and Grace Le ’27 will both be presenting their work on a Furman Men’s Soccer documentary at this year’s Furman Engaged, a campus-wide celebration of engaged learning.

McLane, a history major from Birmingham, Alabama, got involved with the project through history professor Jason Hansen’s study of Pelé’s 1995 visit to Furman during the commemoration of Eugene Stone Stadium. Le, a business marketing major from Hanoi, Vietnam, learned that media specialist and instructor Mary Sturgill was collaborating with Hansen on a documentary about the history of soccer at Furman.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the strengths of a project like this, Hansen said.

“I think it’s great for the students, because they begin to see how professional level work is often teamwork,” he said, “and that you unlock so much more when you pair the thing you do well with what others do well.”

Research spurred Paladin pride

Grace Le ’27 captured behind-the-scenes images as students worked on a documentary of the history of soccer at Furman.

McLane took on the challenge of digging through old copies of student publications, the Bonhomie yearbooks and local newspapers for any references to soccer at Furman. Existing timelines showed Furman fielded its first soccer team in 1967, but McClane quickly found references much earlier.

According to several newspaper reports, Furman students were playing soccer against other university teams as early as 1922. The first reference McLane found had students playing against Clemson at a state physical education conference in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

“It made me want to go tell everyone I knew,” McLane said. “The team was 40 years older than we thought.”

It was the kind of breakthrough researchers dream of. It fueled McLane’s curiosity and pride for his university, digging up details about how Furman’s business connections fueled recruitment for top-level soccer talent throughout the program’s history.

“Sometimes the real payoff for doing research can be in the unexpected,” Hansen said. “In many ways it opens your eyes to things you hadn’t thought about before.”

Creative storytelling takes heart

Grace Le ’27

How do you take more than a century of history and turn it into an engaging story? That was the challenge that intrigued Le. She wanted to combine the technical skills she picked up in her communication studies classes with her own creative perspectives.

“What’s important is how you bridge the two: Emotion,” she said.

As Le watched hours of footage from the university library’s special collections and filmed gleaming trophies won across decades, she felt the pride and investment of generations of Paladins who poured themselves into the soccer program. The most stirring moments came when she filmed interviews with Doug Allison. Allison retired as head coach after 31 years with Furman Soccer, ending his coaching career on a high note after the Men’s Soccer team made the NCAA Final Four in 2025.

While the documentary is still in production, Le is eager to share the heart and soul of this story with other students during Furman Engaged.

“Rather than just showing the history, I will use visual archival footage and our interviews with Coach Allsion to build a narrative of the soccer team,” she said.

“The beauty of this project is watching the research and the storytelling lens come into focus,” Sturgill said. “That collaboration between historical fact finding and creativity is a collaboration that has given us a much richer, more nuanced story of Furman Soccer.”

Sturgill said other students in her classes and in MayX courses will also leave their mark on the documentary, helping gather archival material and shooting interviews for this film that is two years in the making. But Le and McLane were invaluable parts of the project and will share their signature contributions during Furman Engaged.

“Without their help, our production timeline and collection of those materials would have been much, much longer,” Sturgill said.

For a full schedule of Furman Engaged presentations, click here.