As a football player and later an assistant coach, Dick Shiner loved every minute of his connection to the game.
A 1960 Lebanon High School graduate and city native, Shiner played football as a quarterback at the University of Maryland and for six professional teams over 11 seasons from 1964 to 1974 in the National Football League.
“If I had to say, it’s all because you love playing as a player until I got to a point where I was hurting too much. But I mean, as a player, I enjoyed Maryland totally. I enjoyed the NFL. I don’t have any bad things to say about anybody in the NFL,” said Shiner, who lives in North Londonderry Township. “Even Norm Van Brocklyn, as tough as he was and as tough as he was to play for, if you could ignore some of the things you heard, you would learn.”
Shiner said while he didn’t have a great career, he believes he had a good one. During his time in the pros, he played for Washington, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York Giants, Atlanta and New England, and he threw for 4,801 yards and 36 touchdowns.
Wherever he played, he was mostly the back-up QB to players who had great careers, competing for playing time with Sonny Jurgensen in Washington, Fran Tarkenton of the Giants, Jim Plunkett with the Patriots, Frank Ryan in Cleveland, and Terry Bradshaw with the Steelers.
“It never bothered me that way, I mean, even in practice, I spent three years with Sonny Jurgensen, and I tried to be better than him in practice. Now was I? The majority of the time he was better,” Shiner said.
Besides having the distinction of being the first person from Lebanon to play in the NFL, he also led the Maryland Terrapins to their first victory over Penn State during his sophomore season in 1961. Maryland’s all-time record versus PSU is a lopsided 3-44-1.
“That’s one game I will never forget because there were two players on that Penn State team that were quarterbacks here in Central Pennsylvania when I was here. One made all-state two years in a row and was a High School All-American. The other one was first team, Central Penn, which was our league,” Shiner said. “I was second team to him. The biggest thing is neither one of them could throw a football. I mean, not when I say they couldn’t throw, they could throw, but they couldn’t throw the way you have to throw to be able to play at those (upper) levels.”
Shiner, on the other hand, could hurl a football and hit the hide off a baseball, and he excelled as a two-sport athlete in high school in the late 1950s. At the ages of 14 and 15, he said he hit several home runs that would have measured in excess of 420 feet, which is easily a home run in major league stadiums.
“I threw a 90-mile-an-hour fastball. It was nothing for me to stand flat-footed and just turn part of my body and throw a football 40 or 50 yards. Believe me, I could throw it 50 yards with just moving the upper part of my body and not even moving my feet,” he said.
His talent, he said, was in his arm.
“It was that strong. But I could stand at midfield at the university, take a step or two and throw it over top of the goal post and three, four rows into the bleachers,” Shiner said. “I could throw a football between 70 and 75 yards.”
That ability to throw a football long distances caught the eye of a college recruiter and later a sportswriter at The Washington Post, who nicknamed him “The Rifleman” during his freshman season at Maryland.
The recruiter, who was only seven years older than Shiner, would have a legendary coaching career before becoming one of the most colorful college football pre-game show commentators on ESPN.
“The interesting thing about the selection of Maryland was the coach who recruited me was Lee Corso. You know, who was the coach in college football there and did ‘College Football Today’ on Saturdays for years,” said Shiner. “I was 18 years old at the time. He (Corso) was 24, so he was pretty young.”
Now 90, Corso recently retired from his pre-game gig on ESPN, where his animated personality breathed life into the show for years. “He was a good coach, a great guy, and after he had the stroke, I called and talked to him when he was off TV for awhile,” Shiner said, adding that Corso’s personality was as dynamic in real life as it was on TV.
Shiner will turn 84 in mid-July and his memory is still sharp. He talked extensively about the many NFL players with whom he interacted over the years.
He noted that Tarkenton was a poor player in practice but excelled on the field come game day. A Hall of Famer, Tarkenton played 18 seasons, mostly for the Minnesota Vikings. “He’d throw four or five interceptions in practice. On Sunday, three or four touchdown passes,” Shiner said.
Shiner also has an affinity for Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Chuck Noll, who led some of the arguably greatest teams in the history of the sport to Super Bowl wins.
“Dick, he says, ‘When I get this defense to play the way I want them to play, we’re gonna be good.’ And I didn’t even know what he meant, but I found out what he meant watching him coach,” Shiner said, calling Noll a defensive-driven head coach. “His whole deal was placement on the field, you know, where you can get to and what you should be able to cover to the right and to the left of you.”
During his time at Lebanon from 1955 to 1959, Shiner said former head coach Hank Schmalzer was a major influence on his development as a player.
“Hank, let me put it this way, was the coach but also a teacher. And the whole coaching staff was that way,” Shiner said. “It was a good group of people. And that’s really the fondest memory of being able to play for those guys, because they taught us an awful lot. And, you know, the other thing was, we threw the football because I could throw. Most high school teams didn’t throw the ball.”
Shiner said he used what he learned during his time in the NFL when teaching the game as a coach at ELCO, Lebanon Catholic, and Bishop McDevitt high schools. He was an assistant coach two years each at the Lebanon County schools and another 12 at the parochial school in Dauphin County.
One of the players to learn under his tutelage was LeSean McCoy, who was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in 2009 and won two Super Bowl rings in career – one with the Kansas City Chiefs in 2020 and the other at Tampa Bay in 2021, which is the year he retired from the NFL.
After Shiner’s playing days ended, he owned a beer distributorship for six or seven years in Womelsdorf and worked in the copier industry in Maryland before retiring. He and wife Ann moved back to Lebanon County in the early 2010s to be near her family.
A 1979 inductee in the Central chapter of the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame, a 1980 honoree in the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame, a member of the inaugural class of the Lebanon High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2000 and University of Maryland Hall of Fame in 2000, Shiner is grateful for all of these recognitions.
“When you get something like that, it’s really because, again, there were a lot of people along the way that helped you. And you know it’s the game of football itself when you think about it. It’s totally a team game,” he said, adding that baseball, tennis, and other sports celebrate individual achievement.
Another recent achievement he’s happy to have received is the renaming of Lebanon’s Alumni Field to the Dick Shiner Field at Alumni Stadium.
“Wow, that’s great. I mean, you know, it’s a great honor. You don’t expect something like that, for anybody to do that,” he said. “For somebody to do that for me, it’s a great honor. And the biggest thing is this. … You don’t do this stuff yourself. You know, you’ve got help all along the way from your coaches to the players.”
Read More: (May 2026) Lebanon High’s 93-year-old Alumni Stadium is getting a major overhaul
Editor’s note: A portion of a sports column (below) from newspapers.com that appeared in the Lebanon Daily News on Nov. 7, 1961, highlights Shiner’s leading of the Maryland Terrapins to an upset victory over the Penn State Nittany Lions. It was the first time the blue and white lost to their neighbors to the south in college football.
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