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1 Student-Controlled Athletics and Early Reform Walter Camp, often called the “Father of American Football,” may have stated best the role students played in creating American intercollegiate athletics. “Neither the faculties nor other critics assisted in building the structure of college athletics,” Camp noted, three years after completing his six-year football career at Yale, “it is a structure which students unaided have builded.”1 Camp did not claim, however, that students were unaided in the efforts to reform the student games. Students, nevertheless, started the process of reform following the second intercollegiate contest. Several years after Yale’s defeat in the first intercollegiate crew meet, Yale men challenged Harvard to another vacation-time meet. This time it was held on the Connecticut River at Springfield, an 1855 race of one-and-a-half miles downstream and back. The new boat purchased by the Yale crew was not enough to beat the Harvard eight, led by Joseph Brown, a Harvard graduate who had been coxswain of the winning crew in 1852.2 Bringing a graduate back in a successful effort to beat Yale did not seem fair to the Yale undergraduates. They protested Brown’s participation, and Harvard agreed not to compete with its own graduates in future contests. One should note, though, that Harvard and many other universities used graduates of other institutions, who were in professional schools or graduate schools, on their athletic teams into the twentieth century. Students continued to run their own programs, often making dual agreements with another college when they participated in the first intercollegiate sports. Students organized their own sports, and in the second half of the nineteenth century there was a rapid growth of sporting events, generally originating in the eastern colleges and spreading to the West and South. The first six were (1) a crew meet between Harvard and Yale in 1852; (2) a baseball game between Amherst and Williams in 1859; (3) a cricket match between Haverford and Penn in 1864; (4) a football (soccer-like) game between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869; (5) a track meet between Amherst, Cornell, and McGill in 1873; and (6) a football (rugby) game between Harvard and McGill in 1874. By 1900, there were intercollegiate contests in rifle, lacrosse, bicycling, tennis, boxing, polo, cross-country, fencing, ice hockey, basketball, golf, trapshooting, water polo, swimming, and gymnastics.3 Because students originated these contests, they created the rules that attempted Student Controlled Athletics and Early Reform | 9 to level the playing field between contestants, without giving thought to any academic integrity issues that participation in these contests might create. Several examples of disputes leading to competitive changes in the early period of intercollegiate athletics confirm the control of reform by students. By 1870, Harvard and Yale had been rowing dual meets for a number of years, but an incident took place that year in a meet on Lake Quinsigamond near Worcester, Massachusetts . The Lake Quinsigamond site was not long enough for a straightaway race, so the two schools agreed to a turning stake, around which the two crews would negotiate and return to the starting line. At the turning stake, Harvard was leading by about a boat length. As both crews were making the turn, Harvard’s rudder broke, disabling it and allowing Yale to take the lead and the victory. Harvard then protested to the regatta committee, claiming that the Yale boat caused the accident, while Yale believed that the rudder had been broken by the turning stake and not by the Yale shell. After several hours, the judges ruled the victory would go to Harvard. The Yale crew was indignant over the decision and immediately challenged Harvard to row again the next day. Harvard refused, claiming that one of its rowers could not remain. Yale then resolved that “No Yale crew should be allowed to challenge any Harvard crew, except for a straight-away race.”4 After a winter and spring of dispute, played out in the newspapers by students of the two schools, Yale students refused to capitulate to Harvard. Yet Harvard was conscious of its superiority over Yale both as an institution and in crew and called for a convention to create rules and regulations for an open regatta of eastern colleges. Harvard continued to criticize Yale’s conditions: “If Yale refuses to take part in the annual regatta of American colleges, Harvard insists on the right of the challenged party to name the time and place of the race, and...

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