Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

CHAPTER III THE ORGANIZATION OF THE CLUBS TRACK sports, like other athletics, have tended of late years to become so nearly synonymous with college track sports, that the work of non– c<?llegiate athletic clubs in the introduction and furthering of the games of field and cinder path has been obscured and almost forgotten, and, to the present generation of undergraduates, almost unknown. The growth and the clarifying of the amateur spirit, coming as it did side by side with the degeneration of so many athletic clubs into mere circus aggregations for professionals, to– gether with that polite glamour which our so– called "return to the country" has cast on all branches of sport, have made the non-collegiate follower of athletics a less important and interest– ing figure in the public eye. When, however, Mott Haven was yet a name unknown, and a cinder path - without which no cross-roads boarding-school is complete nowadays - could not have been found behind a campus in the country, and when an undergraduate who could run a quarter mile in a minute flat would 256