Donald Snygg (September 24, 1904 – February 1, 1967) was a teacher, a scholar, and a successful basketball and football coach. He is best known for and identified with the beginnings of Phenomenological Psychology. Early years Donald Snygg (born Oram Donald Snygg) was the second child and first son of Edward Emil Snygg and Florence Woolston Snygg, merchants in Magnet, Nebraska. His older sister, Rachael, was a teacher and homemaker. His younger brother, Edward (Ned), manufactured and fitted artificial limbs. Snygg received his primary and secondary education in a one-room schoolhouse and in 1924 obtained his B.A. from the Nebraska State Teachers' College (now Wayne State College) in Wayne, Nebraska. He attended summer school at Columbia University in 1926 and spent additional summers between 1929 and 1932 at the University of Iowa where he earned his M.A. Between 1924 and 1930, he was a science instructor at Randolph High School in Randolph, Nebraska. He was also the school's principal from 1925 to 1930, and as basketball and football coach, he led Randolph's teams to a series of winning seasons remembered by some as the Snygg Era. In 1930, Snygg was hired as Superintendent of Public Schools in Verdigre, Nebraska, but in 1933, as the Depression deepened, the School Board, in good conscience, could no longer employ both Snygg and his wife. The Snyggs resigned and moved to Canada where he began his doctoral studies. Graduate school At the University of Toronto, Snygg studied psychology under K. S. Bernhardt, E. A. Bott, and W. Line. He conducted experiments in learning with humans and rats. Rats, he found, preferred a simple path to their goal over a shorter but more complicated path. Snygg completed his Ph.D. at Toronto in 1935 and stayed on to lecture and do research there for the next two years while also serving as Psychologist to the Toronto Juvenile Court. Oswego years In 1937, Snygg joined the faculty of Oswego State Normal School (now SUNY Oswego) in Oswego, New York as chairman of the Psychology Department. Snygg often used summers to teach at other institutions, including, Columbia University, the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, the University of Illinois in Champaign–Urbana, Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. Snygg remained at Oswego until his untimely death in 1967 from a massive heart attack, suffered while shoveling snow. His many contributions to the community and State of