College athlete

“ Athletics, of course, have their place, and some of the students are beginning to find that place. Certainly the alumni haven't, and I don't believe that the administrative officers have, either. Just so long as athletes advertise the college, the administrations will coddle them. The undergraduates, however, show signs of frowning on professionalism, and the stupid athlete is rapidly losing his prestige. An athlete has to show something more than brawn to be a hero among his fellows nowadays. ”

“ Therefore if school associations want the colleges to take a lively interest in their efforts, to send them trainers, and to offer them cups, I would advise them to work along the lines that college athletes have found most suitable for their purposes, and to let other matters alone. No one to whom I have spoken of this matter so far has disagreed with me. If any readers of this Department have any arguments for the other side, I am sure we shall all be glad to hear them.
IOWA STATE HIGH-SCHOOL ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION GAMES, MUSCATINE, MAY 25, 1895. ”

“ In the June of this year he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, as a gentleman-commoner, leaving in 1807, after a very brilliant career as a scholar, and one not less brilliant as an athlete, being a splendid all-round man — rider, swimmer, walker, runner, dancer, jumper, angler, boater, wrestler, boxer. ”

“ Then he made direct reference to athletics in its relation to both college spirit and college life.
“Sport is too much with us. Of late years I have observed a great increase in the number of athletic students, and a great decrease in scholarship. The fame of the half-back and the short-stop and the stroke-oar has grown out of proportion to their real worth. The freshman is dazzled by it. The great majority of college men cannot shine in sport, which is the best thing that could be. ”

“ Naturally athletics was selected as one of the chief fields of effort. Her managers knew that athletic supremacy would give the college the greatest prestige. Championships in the different branches of sport would attract students, and with a full roster of students, year after year, it was thought to be only a question of time when all the rest would come to her. ”

“ The athletic alumni bring in new students for athletic purposes, and these students increase the athletic excitement while they are undergraduates, and go out from the institution to multiply the athletic alumni.
I am only stating what every insider knows perfectly well, that our college athletics today is almost universally commercialized. All the big colleges have “alumni committees,” who are out scouting for the best athletic material ”

“ It is only natural that a university or college association which takes an active interest in the sports of its preparatory schools should wish to have the athletes who are making ready to enter its ranks familiar with the events on the inter-collegiate card. We all know very well that, no matter how great the college-man's interest may be in sport, as such, he is not going to waste his time and money and energy in training and encouraging young men who do not expect to go to college, or who practise high kicking and standing jumps, or other feats of which he takes no notice. ”

“ They fail to see that there is more in the annual "big game" than nine or eleven supreme athletes brought together to "represent" the University. Fortunately there are many more who view the whole question in its proper perspective, men who are no less thrilled by the contagious enthusiasm of the annual big games, and who recognize them as an inevitable and not undesirable factor in our college life, but who seek to bring athletics into a sane and wholesome relationship with the academic life of our universities. ”

“ It has eaten up much of my time, and there have been days and days when the grind of training and practise and of having to go to bed early, and all that, have been wearing and uninspiring. If it hadn’t been that I felt that I was maintaining the honor of the college by my playing, I should have quit the game long ago. Well, there are a lot of folks that think of college athletics as a waste of the student’s time and as a feature of college life not good in itself, but which must be endured, if men are to be won to college. ”

“ Of independent origin but hastened by the spread of the gymnasium is the vast athletic interest of undergraduates. Its earliest form, conducted on a considerable scale, was rowing. The first rowing club was formed at Yale in 1843, and the first intercollegiate race was rowed on Lake Winnepesaukee in 1852, Harvard defeating Yale. Rowing is now a form of athletics at every college where facilities permit. The first baseball nine was formed at Princeton in 1859, and the game spread rapidly to all the other colleges. ”

“ It is immaterial what organization is suggested for college athletics, or for the betterment of conditions, insofar as college athletics is concerned, Mr. Camp has always played an important part in its conferences, and the great interest in and high plane of college sport to-day, are undoubtedly due more to Mr. Camp than to any other individual. Mr. Camp has probably written more on college athletics than any other writer and the leading papers and magazines of America are always anxious to secure his expert opinion on foot ball, track and field athletics, base ball and rowing. ”

“ A student may throw his hat in the air, grab a megaphone, give 'three long rahs,' go through the gymnastics of a cheer-leader,—putting the most ingenious mechanical toys to shame,—and yet leave some doubt whether he has adequately defined college spirit.
What is this college spirit that hovers over the paid coach and his grandstand—this 'indefinable something,' as one writer calls it, 'which is fanned into a bright flame by intercollegiate athletics'? Shall we judge the spirit by its manifestations in an institution famed above all else for its winning teams and its college spirit? ”

“ By association they know the real spirit and patriotic sentiment of the college men. They appreciate the fact that success in athletics, like success in life, depends not merely upon training the head, but upon training the will. ”

“ Surprising as these figures are, they prove conclusively that the present system of college athletics, so far as it assumes to benefit the students at large, or even a tithe of them, is an utter failure. ”

“ The students in many schools, as we shall see later, have taken their own physical education in hand. The present passion for athletic sports seems wellnigh universal and has gained such headway that it is evident that it must be taken very seriously. Over $1,000,000 are annually spent on college athletics in the United States, an increase of five-fold in the past ten or twelve years, and some young men, at least, unquestionably go to college for the specific purpose of playing upon the university teams. ”

“ As early as 1840 an annual game was played at Yale between the freshmen and the sophomores, but the establishment of a regular football association dates from 1872, also at Yale. In the following year an intercollegiate organization was formed, and since then football has increased in popularity at the colleges to such an extent that just as baseball has become the great national game, so has football become the great American collegiate game. Track athletics is the most recent form of athletic sports to be introduced into the college, and most colleges now have their field days. ”

“ It is an impressive illustration of what has happened to our higher institutions that, in certain of them, the one regular meeting place of the entire student body in a common interest, is the bleachers by the athletic field. One continues to believe in college athletics, in spite of the frequent absurdities and worse, done in their name; only if the numbers of those playing the game and those exercising only their lungs and throats from the bleachers, were reversed, better all-round athletic education would result. ”

“ THE RAH-RAH BOYS The most conspicuous of the activities of the alumni have, of course, to do with athletics; this is the part of college life which the students have made for themselves, and it is what college really means to the great bulk of them. Now, the sedentary life is one of the many evils invented by our civilization, and if college athletics meant that all the students in the institution, both men and women, were getting a thorough “work-out” three or four times a week, I should be willing to say that the athletics justified the colleges. ”

“ It is true that students do talk of a ball match more frequently than of Greek particles. The one belongs to the recreative side of college life, the other to the recitation room. When relieved from his regular duties, the normal student seeks recreation. Beside affording exercise, athletics engender a college spirit which helps to bind together the Yale alumni all over the land. Whatever may be the excesses, the advantages are manifold. The faculty declare that athletics have never been more prominent, nor the standard of scholarship higher than at the present time. ”

“ The struggle on the athletic-field has meaning not simply to a few men who take part, but to every student on the side-lines, while the pulsating hundreds who sing and cheer their team to victory think only of the real effort of their college to produce successful achievement. ”

“ The Baseball and Football Interscholastic leagues are encouraged and looked after by Harvard University athletes, because they develop players who enter Harvard and make good material for the university tennis. For that reason the influence of Harvard men has always been exerted in behalf of the schools that send the best and the most material to college, and also, of course, for the best interests of sport. ”

“ The duty of learning one's lessons is, in these times, opposed by at least two elements of college life. One is self-indulgence and the other is athletics. Self-indulgence is a general cause and constant. Athletics have in the last thirty years come to be a force more or less dominant. Athletics represent a mighty force for collegiate and human betterment. Football, which [Pg 39] is par excellence the college game, is an admirable method of training the man physical, the man intellectual and the man ethical. But football is not a college purpose; it is a college means. ”

“ They establish in the colleges a system of training for their various sports which affects not only the members of the higher institutions of learning, but which reaches almost every young man in the land. To express the idea in Dr. Sargent's words, "the college clubs look to the academies, the academies to the schools, the schools to the homes and firesides, to furnish candidates for athletic honors." Dr. Sargent proposes this as one of his objections to making "excellence in achievement the primary object of athletic exercise." ”

“ Each institution has its well-equipped gymnasium, under the instruction of an efficient instructor, and during the unseasonable days of winter every student of the system is required to go through an hour's drill in the gymnasium three afternoons in the week.
The average man gets his idea of college athletics from the base-ball and foot-ball teams, which generally tour the State annually. ”

“ The trouble is not, of course, that the great secondary interest of student life is sport, but that the American idea of college sport has come to be the training of a few champion athletes for the purpose of winning, not the training of all young men and women for the purpose of recreation. G. Upton Harvey dwells on this point in an article published in the Review of Reviews:
It really is not fair or profitable to judge athletics in general, or any particular sport or game, by the benefits secured by the few. ”

“ College athletics have been most developed in the East, and particularly at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. At most country colleges ample facilities in the way of grounds are furnished for the playing of base-ball, foot-ball, and tennis; and since track athletics, or walking, jumping, sprint and hurdle races, have become popular, very considerable sums have been spent on the grading and improvement of athletic fields. ”

“ College sports are the cleanest, most honorable of sports. They teach the students in this college to be manly in losing, to hold their tongues when the visiting team makes a fumble, and to cheer one for the other. It’s so different from the national game, outside of the college, where the crowds in the bleachers throw pop bottles at the umpire, insult the players, and nag one another bitterly. ”

“ There is only one day to make good and that is the day of the game. The next day is too late.
Then there is the ever-present recollection of the fellow who let athletics be the big thing in his college life. He did not make good in the classroom. He was unfair to himself. He failed to realize that athletics was only a part of his college life, that it should have been an aid to better endeavor in his studies.
He may have earned his college letter or received a championship gold football. And now [Pg 44] that he is out in the world he longs for the college degree that he has forfeited. ”

“ The years of late boyhood and early manhood say from twelve or fourteen to twenty-eight or thirty, and often until much later are those in which athletic sports prove not only most attractive, but also most beneficial to the individual and the race. In college and in most of the schools which are preparatory for college rowing, foot-ball, base-ball, running, jumping, sparring, and the like have assumed a constantly increasing prominence. ”