Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

Track Athletics It included Cornell, Union, Syracuse, Hobart, Rochester, Hamilton, and Madison, and, like the New England Association, made possible a joint meet, in which the minor colleges might com– pete with a keener sense of sentimental rivalry and with a fairer chance of doing themselves jus– tice than they could at the big annual meet at Mott Haven. What was true of New England and New York was true of the Middle West and the Pa– cific Slope, although in the smaller colleges of the Middle West the new sport was slow in striking fire. And, for the matter of that, many of these little colleges gave scant attention to any sort of sport in those days, and what tentative interest the undergraduates themselves happened to take was likely to be frowned upon by the faculty. Most of these small colleges were either coeduca– tional or strongly sectarian, or both. In the first there was likely to be a feeling that there was something incompatible between athletics and a decorous gentlemanliness, and in the latter sport was looked at askance as flippant and of the flesh fleshy. Those who had these institutions in charge were generally men who had come from good old New England stock, or who had been brought up in the stern school of the pioneer, and it was naturally very difficult for them to look upon mere games as anything but a waste of