Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

Track Athletics in the Colleges 279 Haven Team," as ~ team, became of sufficient importance to make the contest for the cup between the traditional rivals really close. Harvard won in that year - the hundred-yard dash alone determin– ing the result-but in the following year Yale, with Coxe, '87, the big centre-rush, as captain and weight-thrower, and such men as Sherrill, the sprinter, Ludington in the hurdles, Shear– man in the jumps, and Harmer, the freshman miler, at last won. There were nineteen col– leges represented at Mott Haven that year. Yale scored six firsts and four seconds. It was a well– earned victory, and from that time on the track team at Yale took the place which it now holds beside the nine, the eleven, and the crew. Similar development had been going on in the smaller New England colleges. At Amherst, where a department of physical education had been established as early as I 860 and the interest in outdoor games had always been keen, the new sport was taken up with especial enthusiasm. It came in just at the time that the interest in row– ing - obviously an impracticable sport at water– less Amherst- was dying out, and the success of the men whom Amherst sent down to Saratoga in 1875 set the ball rolling. A regular track meet was held in the following autumn, and ever since then these class games have been a regular feature of the fall term. So has the barrel of