Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

294 Track Athletics eighties, their final slipping into profession– alism, and their decline. Lastly, the colleges, beginning with desultory cross-country runs and gradually getting together at Saratoga and Mott Haven, and later in the South, the Middle West, and in California, so developed and cleansed and strengthened the sport that when the time ar– rived for the clubs to drop out there were undergraduates and schoolboys from Maine to California ready to jump into the running. The good that has come from track athletics can hardly, I believe, be exaggerated. Other sports may be more exciting to the spectator, and more fun for the man who is in the game; almost any man, I dare say, would rather stroke a winning crew or make a winning touchdown than win by a few inches a hundred-yard race. But no other college sport can be indulged in by so many .men; no other sport opens such possi– bilities to the average man and the duffer. And it is the average man and the duffer who need looking after and need encouragement. The man who can make an eleven or a crew doesn't need any physical training. He is either already a "born" athlete or of a temperament that will get vigorous play and exercise whether or no. The track teams of our colleges and schools have not only drawn into athletics and healthy sport thousands of men who might otherwise have