Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

Track Athletics important. It was at one of these fie~d days that Harry Jewett, who won the national amateur championship in the hundred in ten flat in 1892, came up from Notre Dame as a raw schoolboy and first showed what was in him. Ducharme, the Detroit Athletic Club hurdler, was another club athlete who ran in the Ann Arbor open games. In 1893 the Universities of Michigan, Minne– sota, and \.Visconsin and Northwestern University, which had formed a league for football the pre– ceding year, held an intercollegiate track meet at Chicago. There had been more interest taken in track athletics at the University of Illinois and in the Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio colleges than at either Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Northwestern, but because of the size and subsequent athletic importance of the uni versities which sent teams to Chicago in 1893, their meet may be said to mark the beginning of Middle Western intercol– legiate athletics. Michigan won the games. The league was dissolved the following winter, but the next season, in June, 1894, a sort of invitation meet was held at Chicago, which was a much greater success than the first one. The Uni– versities of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, Chicago and Northwestern U niver– sities, and Oberlin and Iowa Colleges all took part. Illinois won handily, and the Iowa colleges came next. The meeting held at Chicago following