Duquesne Athletic Club



The Duquesne Athletic Club professional ice hockey team, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, played for only one season in 1908–09. It won the final championship of the Western Pennsylvania Hockey League (WPHL).

History
The Duquesne Athletic Club (DAC) was established in 1908 in a new building leased from steel and real estate magnate Henry Phipps. Located on Duquesne Way in downtown Pittsburgh, the building featured a swimming pool, a gymnasium and Turkish baths. The new club promised to support a variety of sports and teams, including a WPHL ice hockey team to be "composed of stars". The hockey team took the place in the league vacated by the defunct Pittsburgh Pirates.

The club secured Alf Smith, former Ottawa Silver Seven star who began his professional career with the Pittsburgh Athletic Club, to captain the team and choose its players. Though unable to retain Smith for more than a small part of the season, the DAC finished with a 10–4–1 record to win the league title. The championship came down to the last game of the season in which Duquesne beat the Pittsburgh Bankers 4–2.

The Duquesne team existed only in the last season of the WPHL, a season during which many players in the league "jumped" their contracts for better offers from Canadian clubs. Such desertions depleted the league's rosters and forced the mid-season disbandment of one Pittsburgh team, the Lyceum, whose remaining players were distributed to the league's three remaining teams. The official WPHL referee, Roy Schooley, questioned whether the DAC would have won the title had all of the teams that started the season finished intact, but praised Duquesne's performance, saying that "after the making over process they played earnestly, consistently, and at times brilliantly". Schooley gave special credit for the team's success to players Harry McRobie (who finished the season as captain), Tom Westwick, Joe Dennison, and Ray Robinson, the last of whom Schooley called "by far the best left wing in the league".

McRobie, Westwick, and Dennison abandoned the team in early January for the St. Catharines Pros of the Ontario Professional Hockey League, but after only a few days there, reconsidered and came back to the DAC. The Duquesne team was from then on nicknamed the "Prodigals", referencing the biblical Parable of the Prodigal Son.

References to uniform color are in reports of a game played December 19, 1908: The team was referred to in one newspaper as the "brown and white artists" and in another as the "maroon jersey wearers".