The Rise of Intercollegiate Sports

In the nineteenth century, unlike anywhere else in the Western world, intercollegiate sports and the pageantry accompanying them became a major feature of the American educational system. Sports helped to bind students, faculties, administrators, alumni, and social climbers into a single college community. The growth of college sports helped to solidify the idea that competitive athletics helped young men build valuable qualities such as strength, discipline, and leadership – countering widespread anxieties that growing prosperity was making elite young men too soft. A range of critics charged that sports – especially the new game of football – undermined the academic goals of higher education. But skillful innovators and promoters such as Yale’s Walter Camp and prominent supporters such as “strenuous life” advocate Theodore Roosevelt helped spread the sport’s popularity. The popular press turned Thanksgiving Day football games into the nation’s most prominent sporting spectacles, with tens of thousands of eager partisans crowding into cities and stadiums to witness the big events. Eventually, intercollegiate sports would become one of the most powerful forces in defining American college identities and giving them emotional depth.