page_title: Hercules Renda
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Hercules Renda / Early years
caption_attribution_description: English: Advertisement for Hercules Powder
context_page_description: Hercules Gennaro Renda was an American football player and coach. He played for the University of Michigan football team from 1937 to 1939. He was an assistant football coach at Michigan under Fritz Crisler from 1940 to 1941. He later served as a high school football and track coach in Pontiac, Michigan for many years and was inducted into the Michigan High School Coaches Hall of Fame.
context_section_description: A native of West Virginia born to Italian immigrant parents, Renda grew up in Cabin Creek in the state's coal country.  He was named after a brand of mining dynamite ("Hercules Dynamite" and "Hercules Powder") that was popular among West Virginia coal miners at the time.
  Renda became a star athlete at East Bank High School in East Bank, West Virginia.  During the summers, he worked as a "tippler" at the coal mine.  During the school year, he played basketball and football and ran the dash and low hurdles for the track team.  He was badly injured in a high school basketball game when he was "bumped while in the air with both feet off the floor and landed on his head."  Renda later said that five weeks in the hospital taught him that football was the best and safest sport after all.
  As a high school senior in 1935, Renda drew attention from the West Virginia press for his skill as a running back.  The state's leading newspaper, the Charleston Gazette wrote in October 1935: "In Hercules Renda, East Bank will show its greatest running back of all time. Renda has scored 11 times for East Bank this year and his runs have varied from 10 to 95 yards." In November 1935, the Gazette called him "stocky Hercules Renda, a fast stepping but nevertheless rugged halfback, who has been running wild all season."  (Twenty years later, NBA Hall of Famer Jerry West attended East Bank High; West was nicknamed "Zeke from Cabin Creek".)
caption: Renda was named after Hercules Powder, depicted here in a 1918 advertisement.
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