In closing this review of the development of athletics in the University it may not be amiss to emphasize the fact that the present status of collegiate sport is not without its inconsistencies and dangers. There is real peril for _mens sana_ in an overdeveloped _corpore sano_. The general and healthy interest in all forms of outdoor sport of earlier days has been all but lost in this era of specialization. Nowadays the Varsity team too often is far from being the apex of a pyramid whose foundations lie in a widely distributed and wholesome interest in sports for their own sake. Too often we have the spectacle of high-school students coming to our universities with their careers all made for them, because of their ability in athletics, bringing with them a spirit of professionalism utterly foreign to university ideals. And yet all this has come as a natural result of the heritage of the American college student, of enterprise, resourcefulness, and love of outdoor life and sports.
The ideal, of course, is a general participation of all students in some form of outdoor games, and toward this those who have the best interest of inter-collegiate athletics at heart are working. A Department of Intramural Athletics has been established for some time, which seeks to develop a general interest in all kinds of sport;--tennis, for which Ferry Field is admirably equipped with eighteen courts, boxing, gymnastics, swimming, cross-country running, hockey, indoor baseball and hand-ball, to say nothing of an increasing emphasis on class and fraternity football, base-ball, and basket-ball teams.
The difficulty which faces those who seek to develop this programme to its utmost lies in the attitude of many students and alumni, whose sole interest in the University is to see that she maintains winning teams. They fail to see that there is more in the annual "big game" than nine or eleven supreme athletes brought together to "represent" the University. Fortunately there are many more who view the whole question in its proper perspective, men who are no less thrilled by the contagious enthusiasm of the annual big games, and who recognize them as an inevitable and not undesirable factor in our college life, but who seek to bring athletics into a sane and wholesome relationship with the academic life of our universities. That is the principal consideration which underlies all the discussions which have arisen in the past and which are inevitable in the future,--as long as American youth, on the one hand, maintains its vigorous and enterprising spirit, and our universities, on the other hand, insist on their prerogative as institutions where fundamentally the things of the spirit must rule.