The Rise of Intercollegiate Sports

The First Intercollegiate Sport• Students at Harvard and Yale formed rowing (or

crew) clubs in 1844• First rowing match was held in 1852; a small New

England railroad sponsored the contest between Harvard and Yale in order to promote the area as a summer resort – over 1000 spectators attended

• Harvard won the race, but neither team hired a coach or trainer, or prepared for the contest

• After the race, the crews and other students “passed a very pleasant week at the Lake, and returned together to Concord, New Hampshire, where, amid much good feeling and many fraternal adieus, they finally separated.”

• In the meantime, the widely publicized exploits of English boys kindled an interest in sports among American collegians

• Thomas Hughes’ popular novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), which vividly described the sporting life at Rugby School, excited American students

Reporters at the 1858 Oxford-Cambridge race praised English students for their physical abilities and criticized

“the entire disregard for exercise among Americans.”

• Angered by these reports, the editor of Harvard’s student magazine wrote, “What say we, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, shall we introduce a new institution in America?”

• Student representatives from four colleges responded by forming the College Union Regatta Association in 1858 and sponsored successful races in 1859 and 1860 on Lake Quinsigamond, with as many as 20,000 spectators watching each regatta

• Harvard raced against Oxford in 1869 on the Thames River in England

Harvard lost, but the race stimulated collegians to form a new rowing association of Northeastern colleges in 1870

• As many as 16 colleges competed in the regattas of the Rowing Association of American Colleges

• In the mid-1870s, Harvard and Yale suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of smaller, less prestigious schools

• Harvard lost to Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1871 and Cornell in 1875; afterwards Harvard and Yale withdrew from the Association and proceeded to row almost exclusively only against one another

• Even in the 1880s and 1890s, when football began to supplant rowing in popularity, crews continued to evoke strong loyalties at several northeastern colleges

Intercollegiate Baseball• In the first recorded intercollegiate contest

(1859), Amherst defeated Williams 73-32

• The Civil War temporarily set back baseball, but in the war’s wake college clubs formed in all parts of the nation

• Until the 1880s, the Harvard Base Ball Club, organized in 1862, fielded the strongest college team in the country

• For a seven-year span they did not lose a single intercollegiate game

Harvard baseball team, 1867

Harvard baseball team, 1871

• In the summer of 1870, they took an extended road trip through the West, playing all the major amateur and professional teams in the nation

• They won 44 of 54 games, and barely lost to the powerful Cincinnati Red Stockings

• Throughout the 19th century, baseball remained the most widely played sport on college campuses and confronted many problems

• In the fall, it had to contend with the growing popularity of football, and in the spring with inclement weather

• During the summer, college players (usually under assumed names) sometimes joined professional teams; for almost a century, college officials tried without much success to prevent students’ playing for pay

Harvard baseball team at practice, 1898

Intercollegiate Track and Field• In the 1860s – probably inspired by the Caledonian

Games – American students began to devote a special day to contests in running, jumping and throwing

• Formal intercollegiate track and field began as an offshoot of crew; in 1873, James Gordon Bennett Jr. offered a silver challenge cup valued at $500 for a two-mile race as part of Saratoga intercollegiate regatta – only three men competed in the first event

• In 1876, the Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletics of America (IC4A) was formed and held its annual games on the grounds of the New York Athletic Club at Mott Haven

• Between 1880 and 1897 either Harvard or Yale won all the IC4A meets

The Making of College Football• College students used the first football games as

initiation rites for incoming freshmen• Beginning in 1827, sophomores at Harvard

subjected freshman to a violent game on the first Monday of the school term; as early as 1840, Yale also took up the practice

• Invariably, these games resulted in black eyes, bloodied noses, sprained limbs and shredded clothes – by 1860 the interclass matches had been abolished at both Harvard and Yale

• In the late 1860s and early 1870s, students began to form clubs in the northeastern colleges

The first intercollegiate football game was played between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869

• All of the clubs (except Harvard) played under some version of the London Football Association rules, which was essentially a rough version of soccer – Harvard played a version that was more similar to rugby, which allowed players to carry the ball and engage in more physical contact

• When Harvard hosted McGill University of Montreal in 1874, the teams agreed that two games would be played on consecutive days: one under Harvard’s “Boston rules” and the other under the stricter rugby rules of McGill University.

Despite struggling to a scoreless tie, the Harvard athletes became immediate converts to the stricter

style of rugby endorsed by McGill University

• Within only a few years, the other northeastern colleges adopted the rugby game

• In 1876, student delegates from Princeton, Columbia, Yale and Harvard founded the Intercollegiate Football Association

• Initially, the association counted touchdowns as only one point and kicked goals as four

• They set up a schedule and decided to hold a championship game at the end of the season, a decision that encouraged teams to emphasize winning

For the remainder of the 19th century, no single person exceeded Walter C. Camp, the “Father of American

Football,” in shaping the modern college game

• A member of the Yale squad from 1875 to 1882 (captain in 1878 and 1879), Camp also played baseball, crew, track and lawn tennis

• After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in 1880, he continued at Yale as a medical student and football player for two more years

• In 1880, Camp obtained approval from the association rules committee for a revolutionary way of putting the ball into play

• The new rule provided for a line of scrimmage; unless the ball was fumbled or kicked to the opposing side, the offensive team could repeatedly begin play at the line of scrimmage without interference of the defensive team

• Unfortunately, Camp failed to make any provision for the offensive team to surrender the ball when they were unable to move it forward

• The Yale-Princeton game of 1881 was a fiasco; Princeton repeatedly lost yardage while retaining possession of the ball for the entire first half; Yale employed the same strategy in the second half

• In 1882, Camp devised a solution: the offensive team had to give up the ball if it was unable to gain five yards in three attempts

• This rule change led to the placement of lines across the field at five yard intervals

• The new rules widened opportunities for the invention of new tactics

• Teams began to use offensive signals• During most of the 1880s, the game featured wide-

open offensive action with open field running, frequent kicking, and sideline passes (throws across the line of scrimmage – forward passes – were prohibited until 1906)

• In 1888, tackling was permitted below the waist (another Camp recommendation), which resulted in carefully designed plays emphasizing mass and momentum

• As early as 1884, the University of Pennsylvania initiated their famous “V Trick,” in which players enclosed the ball carrier within forward-moving V

• Breaking this fearsome formation required defensive men without protective gear to hurl themselves directly in front of the V or to try crashing its flanks

• Although teams moving forward en masse became illegal in 1895, tight formations became common in the first decade of the 20th century

Yale football team, 1894

• In the early years of college football, students themselves organized the clubs, scheduled the games, managed the finances and determined the rules

• Student-elected team captains determined who would play and how to train; football captains soon occupied one of the most prestigious positions on campus

• In the 1880s, students began to invite alumni to campus to assist in the preparation of the team

• Around 1885, Camp became a regular advisor to Yale captains and coaches; from 1888 to 1906 he was an unpaid “advisory coach”

• Because of his job at a watch manufacturing firm, Camp could rarely attend practices; his wife attended practices and took notes, and in the evenings Camp advised the team leaders

• Everywhere, schools tried to emulate the Yale model, but without complete success

• The record established by Yale from 1872 through 1909 has never been equalled: 324 victories, 17 losses, and 18 ties

• From 1893 to 1898, Yale produced nine undefeated teams – and from the final game of the 1890 season to the ninth game of 1893, Yale scored 1265 points to none for its opponents

Yale vs Princeton, 1879

Yale vs Princeton, 1890

Harvard gave Yale a rare defeat in this 1901 meeting, 22-0

• Walter Camp was also college football’s most successful promoter

• He flooded the newspapers and periodicals with feature stories of games, summaries of seasons, inside knowledge of football fundamentals, and trivia – and he wrote twenty books on sports

Football: Retrospective and Prospective, by Walter Camp

Camp recognized the potential for making football a profitable sport, and he urged that the major games be played in

New York City rather than on the college’s home field. Above: Yale vs Princeton at Eastern Park in Brooklyn, 1890

The Invention of Pageantry• Led by the students, college sport enthusiasts

invented an exceptionally rich set of symbols and rituals to accompany their games – colors, mascots, nicknames, yells and songs

• By the 1890s, the annual Thanksgiving Day games represented a special holiday for the college community at large

• In the mid-1890s, some 120,000 athletes, belonging to colleges, athletic clubs and high schools, played in some 5000 Thanksgiving Day football games

• For sheer theatrics, few spectacles anywhere exceeded the Thanksgiving Day game played in New York City between the nation’s two top colleges

• On Wednesday, an advance contingent of collegians arrived in the city. By evening, “the sidewalks of Broadway flashed with blue and orange ribbons and the buildings along the way resounded with the impact of many and diverse college cheers.”

On Thanksgiving Day morning, a parade of horsedrawn coaches made its way through the heart of the city; bright banners featuring the school colors hung from many residences and hotels along the way

The festivities continued at the game; from atop their coaches, the rich ate their lunches and drank their champagne.

Above: Harvard fans at Polo Grounds in New York before Yale-Harvard game, Thanksgiving 1887

During the game the fans were regaled with vivid displays of school colors, vociferous school cheers

led by “yell captains,” and boisterous songs. Above: Yale vs Princeton, Thanksgiving 1891

• After the game, the great crowd, perhaps as many as 40,000, boarded the coaches and elevated trains for the return trip downtown

• Happy parties crowded every restaurant for Thanksgiving Day feasts

• During the evening, many of the celebrants attended the theaters where they more often than not interrupted performances with raucous displays of school spirit

The Making of College Communities

• College students made extracurricular activities the center of college life; student involvement in sports transformed the spirit of 19th century college campuses

• College presidents and faculties quickly recognized football’s sway over the undergraduates; student disorder, hazings and drunkenness declined with the advent of football at Yale

• Administrators also quickly concluded that football offered other tangible benefits to the colleges; they seized on the sport to draw attention to their colleges and recruit students

• Consciously or unconsciously, administrators recognized that the rugged character of football might counter the traditional image of college men as effeminate

• Upon assuming the presidency of John D. Rockefeller’s newly endowed University of Chicago in 1892, William Rainey Harper set out to publicize the new university by establishing a winning football team

• Harper hired former Yale player Amos Alonzo Stagg, making Stagg the first coach with professorial rank in the country. “I want you to develop teams which we can send around the country and knock out all the other colleges,” Harper told Stagg

• Stagg responded with enthusiasm. “If Chicago University places a team in the field it must be a winning team or one which will bring honor to the university.”

Stagg and his team at practice

Another Chicago practice

According to Stagg, during the halftime of a game in which Chicago trailed Wisconsin 12-0, Harper delivered an impassioned plea to the Chicago players. “Boys, Mr. Rockefeller has just announced a gift of $3,000,000 to the University. He believed that the University is to be great. The way you played in the first half leads me to wonder whether we really have the spirit of greatness … I wish you would make up your minds to win this game and show that we have it.”’ Chicago players responded in the second half by winning 22-12.

• In the closing years of the century football encouraged the growth of an alumni subculture

• Alumni in cities remote from their college campuses organized chapters, sponsored elaborate homecoming events, and printed bulletins listing the achievements of their classmates and the latest exploits of the football team

• College authorities tried to convert the alumni’s enthusiasm into generous contributions

• But the alumni demanded a price; they wanted a winning football team and sometimes a substantial voice in the management of the school’s football program

• Although women rowed, hiked, rode horseback and ice skated on college campuses before the 1890s, they rarely engaged in competitive physical activities – instead women remained on the sidelines of men’s intercollegiate sports

• Until the advent of college football, women had usually been forbidden by the dictates of Victorian decency from attending the more disreputable sporting spectacles

• Football was different; the annual fall horse show and the Thanksgiving Day contest in New York launched the city’s winter social season, and debutante balls and banquets soon followed