Student athlete

“ One of the many beneficial results of this focus on sound education is a reemphasis on the role of academic life for our Nation's student athletes.
For decades, we have cheered our high school and college athletes as they have played the sports our country loves. Sometimes lost in "the tumult and the shouting," however, is the realization that, of every 10,000 student athletes, only one ever becomes a professional athlete; that the one who does so can expect a professional career of less than 4 years ”

“ We rightly support and salute our student athletes for their accomplishments on the diamond, the gridiron, the hardwood, the track, and every sort of playing field; but we must also do the same for athletes and all students for what they accomplish in the classroom as well. Parents, teachers, and coaches fulfill their obligations to student athletes by expecting and by fostering the high academic performance that is everyone's key to a bright, rather than a blighted, future. ”

“ Recreational activities and athletics
Competitive athletics are typical of the American college. Theoretically, athletics are open to all students. Practically, in many of our colleges athletics are made available only to the student with leisure time and exceptional physique. Consistent effort is being made today by college authorities to provide opportunities for intramural (interclass, intergroup, and mass) athletics for the whole student body ”

“ 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. ”

“ No instructor has shoulders equal to such a multiple burden as coaching, steering and doing all the rowing, too. To play any classroom game in this spirit is to be dead weight for every one else embarked upon the same adventure. It is not fair-play.
By such an attitude on the part of merely one student in the class, every other student associated with her loses, for the girl who will not lift her own weight the others must carry. If that student were playing in that spirit on the basket-ball team, do you suppose that the coach, or the captain, would let her stay on? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The flimsy background of the undergraduate is not to be wondered at where undergraduate expression in any channel is left by the college authorities unorganized and childish. And his low state must inevitably continue until ideas are not merely collected, with some vague idea of gilding the interior of his soul, but resolutely put to work. One reason for the overmastering devotion to athletics in the modern college is exactly its activity. In that field the student can do something. ”

“ If every schoolboy, whether an athlete or a grind, and every college man would sign it and stick to it, we’d never hear of one school’s having ‘severed athletic relations’ with another; there’d be no brawling in football games, and we’d never see the charge of professionalism brought against a college. And it is a pledge that we need not leave behind us when we graduate; it’s a good pledge to stick to right through life.
“I have no fault to find with Hillton athletes on the score of unfairness. I earnestly believe that athletics are pure here ”

“ Student athletics, although they form an important part of the necessary physical training, are not sufficient. So far as they go they are invaluable, drawing the student out of doors and away from the routine of school life, and affording exercise made vigorous by the stimulus of competition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While we play we keep our minds occupied by the sport, and at the same time we exercise our muscles and feed our lungs and our bodies with oxygen.
It is unfortunate that in school or college athletics those who need exercise the most are often those who are physically unfitted to play on the school teams. In other words, we select our runners and jumpers and football players from among the stronger boys, while the weaker ones really need the benefit of the sport. Every boy should take part in school games when possible even if he is not as swift or as strong as some other boys. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In other trials it was the same—broad jump, shot-putting, relay race teams, and all the rest. There was developed in the freshman class a sprinter who almost bested Bobby Hargrew at first; but the freshmen had little, after all, to do when the big day came.
The main contestants for athletic honors were bound to be drawn from the junior and sophomore classes. It was a fact that the present senior class of Central High had not been as imbued with the spirit of after-hour athletics, or with loyalty to the school, as had the younger classes. ”

“ Nowadays the Varsity team too often is far from being the apex of a pyramid whose foundations lie in a widely distributed and wholesome interest in sports for their own sake. Too often we have the spectacle of high-school students coming to our universities with their careers all made for them, because of their ability in athletics, bringing with them a spirit of professionalism utterly foreign to university ideals. ”

“ Some such feeling seems to dominate the American collegian.
CONCERNING ATHLETICS
Because of such athletic tendencies, the college student has been the recipient of the disapprobation of a certain type of onlookers in general, and of many college faculties in particular.
President Lowell of Harvard, in advocating competitive scholarship, in a Phi Beta Kappa address at Columbia University, said, “By free [32] use of competition, athletics has beaten scholarship out of sight in the estimation of the community at large, and in the regard of the student bodies.” ”

“ Judging from this free expression, the students rate the interests of intercollegiate athletics nearly three times as high as the combined interests of art, music, religion, philosophy, social service, literature, debating, the curriculum, and the faculty. Second in importance to intercollegiate athletics, valued at 450 inches, are dances and fraternities, valued at 78 inches.
Another possible measure of the student's interest is found in Harvard of Today from an Undergraduate Point of View, published in 1913 by the Harvard Federation of Territorial Clubs. The book gives to athletics ten pages ”

“ Skating is not allowed, for this, too, is dangerous; and, for the same reason, gymnastics are permitted only once a week, each student going in turn to the gymnasium and staying there for about three minutes. And so in French colleges these blustering years of boyhood know no other variety of pleasure than the treadmill of the courtyard. Backwards and forwards they walk in recreation hours, talking together; and need it be supposed that the words of wisdom are ever on their lips? As I have said, the day-students do not need much pity. ”

“ On the other hand, graduates of the school, who are no longer affected by the influences of active personal competition in sport, can better understand the methods and feelings of the students and the requirements of school athletics. They are closer to the boys than the professor can possibly be, and they naturally inspire more confidence in the younger men, because the latter feel that these graduates have a livelier personal interest in sport itself than an older man can have, who has probably never participated in any of these games. ”

“ But they need not enter into the question of the harm or benefit of athletics, since at every well-conducted school or college those boys are not allowed to take up with athletics. Yes, generally speaking, the boy who comes to school to study can afford to play football, train for football, and think football, because instead of interfering with his studies it really helps him with them. ”

“ School and college athletics, rightly indulged in, give the budding man health, strength, courage and discipline to take with him out into the battle of life. We didn't have much in the way of athletics when I was at college, but I appreciate the modern tendency more than do some men of my age. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Miss Bishop was wise enough to lay much stress on physical development. A ten minutes' drill was part of the daily routine, a gymnasium practice was held twice a week, and Wednesday afternoons were devoted to hockey. In addition to this the girls played tennis on the asphalt courts during the winter and spring terms, whenever the weather was suitable, and basket ball was constantly going on in the playground. Athletics was decidedly the fashionable cult of the school. Kirsty Paterson, as Games Captain, made it her business to see that nobody slacked without justifiable cause. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a tendency in this country to-day to give too great an importance to athletics—to take it much too seriously—and it is this tendency that should be guarded against, especially among school and college youths. ”

“ I suppose the most evident, certainly the most picturesque, exhibition of school spirit is to be seen in connection with athletics, and it reaches its climax in an inter-school game. The authorities of some schools say frankly that they permit such games, with their interruption of serious work and other disadvantages, chiefly because they tend to develop school spirit and school loyalty. Athletic contests are good, for they give training in self-subordination, self-control, alertness, and dogged perseverance. The individual loses himself in the good of the whole. ”