FOOTBALL 



2255 



FOOTBALL 



Football in the United States 



The name American Rugby sounds strange 

 to football players in the United States, but 

 it is the correct name for their game. The 

 early Virginia colonists brought the older Eng- 

 lish game to America, and soon after 1830 

 students at several of the eastern colleges 

 began to play it. Ten years later, at Amherst, 

 Brown, Harvard, Trinity and Yale, there were 

 interclass games resembling the class rushes 

 which still take place in some colleges, and so 

 rough did they become that in 1860 the facul- 

 ties of Harvard and Yale prohibited football. 

 At Princeton a more orderly game was played, 

 adapted from the English "Association" code, 



Harvard rules, and Harvard scored three times. 

 The next day, under McGill rules, neither side 

 was able to score. The success of these two 

 contests aroused enthusiasm for Rugby, and 

 in 1875 Harvard and Yale played a game 

 under a compromise set of rules which ad- 

 mitted both of running with the ball and of 

 batting the ball with the hand. This compro- 

 mise was unsatisfactory, and in 1876 Columbia, 

 Princeton and Yale abandoned the other form 

 of football in favor of straight Rugby. 



Like all the more popular athletic competi- 

 tions of the colleges of the United States, 

 football has become a highly-specialized activ- 



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and in 1869 the first intercollegiate contest took 

 place between Princeton and Rutgers. In 1871 

 football was revived at Harvard, with rules 

 which permitted running with the ball, as in 

 Rugby; two years later Harvard's team re- 

 fused to join the association formed by Yale, 

 Columbia, Princeton and Rutgers because its 

 players would not abandon the Rugby style 

 of play. 



Not long after this, McGill College in Mon- 

 treal challenged Harvard to a match, and on 

 May 15, 1874, these two teams played the 

 first intercollegiate Rugby match in America. 

 McGill's players were accustomed to English 

 Rugby rules and Harvard's to their own ver- 

 sion of them, so on the preceding day the two 

 teams courteously coached each other in tac- 

 tics. On the 15th a match was played under 



ity. The original Rugby rules have been en- 

 tirely superseded by a gradual development 

 of a code much more complex but permitting 

 a far higher development of team play. Play- 

 ers are trained by professional coachers who 

 in some cases receive several thousand dollars 

 for a season's work. Each man is drilled in 

 the elements of the game by long hours of 

 practice in tackling dummies and charging 

 against wooden frames. Team work is taught 

 in scrimmages, the sham battles of football, 

 and strategy is studied by blackboard talks. 

 Though the game is played only in the au- 

 tumn, the more ambitious colleges have prac- 

 tice in the spring as well. 



As a result of all this care, a football game 

 between two great colleges is one of the most 

 interesting and exciting spectacles anywhere 



