FAVORS EXPERT COACHES

While it is quite without the province of one who follows intercollegiate sport in a capacity more or less critical, gratuitously to offer opinions outside his own medium of publicity concerning the conduct of athletic affairs at one institution or another, yet the question of resident coaches as opposed to the instructor engaged merely for the season has assumed a wide-spread importance which may be regarded as justifying the CRIMSON--or whatever university daily, for that matter,--in opening wide doors and windows for the admission of whatever light may come from any source or quarter.

Personally, then, I may say that I have gained at least one great conviction in the years that I have followed intercollegiate athletics: a game that is worth playing at all is worth playing well. All youthful habits and tendencies are, of course, formative. This is recognized in the classroom where ill-ordered, half-hearted inefficient instruction is not tolerated, and where various measures are effective whereby students shall be inspired to a high sense of their opportunities as well as to lofty ideals concerning their duty to their college and their duty to themselves. In principle, at least, no detail of curricular work is either slurred or minimized; the system is highly professional--and so with those moral aspects of university teaching whose tenets are an inflexible morality and a righteous spirit. All immensely worth while.

So much so -- and I present this as a thought, merely -- that when we adopt for the athletic field a system of endeavor less serious in its demands and less exalted in its obligations are we not operating to defeat the primary purposes of essential university work as already set forth? In other words, does not a boy, whether he be a Varsity man or a member of a class or whatever team, receive moral and physical benefit from any game in which he may play in proportion as he is taught and inspired to play that game to the limit of his ability. Therein, I should say, we exemplify the American university spirit, or, to put it more broadly, the national spirit.

The important thing therefore is not so greatly related to an ethical issue as between the seasonal and the permanent coach as to the desirability of excellent instruction. If Harvard, Princeton, or Yale or whatever college could find one man each, in whom resided the ability to approximate in football the qualities of a Haughton, in baseball the genius of a Bill Clarke, in rowing the ability of a William Haines and so on, there would be no questioning the advisability of engaging him permanently. But of course such a paragon does not exist.

The alternative, then, is to employ certain specialists at certain times or to maintain a staff of coaches the year round whose dominant characteristic is their mediocrity. Mediocrity is implied if only for the reason that the cost of maintaining permanently a group of men such as Haughton, Tad Jones, et al, would be altogether prohibitive--assuming they could be induced to devote all their time to athletics at any price.

Emphasis, it would seem, may thus be centered upon just what the desire of our collegiate authorities is: do they wish their representative teams to play the game up to the hilt, or to play bumble puppy? There was a time when Harvard's elevens and crews under nondescript coaching systems lost to Yale with doleful frequency. Later, some serious attention was devoted to the conduct of athletics at Cambridge with a resultant systemization and rigidity of control. Ergo a lessening percentage of defeats on field, diamond, stream, etc. Which epoch was more beneficial in its effects upon the pride, morale and scholastic incentive of the Harvard undergraduate? In which epoch was there the greater tendency toward exercise in the open? Personally I do not know, but I do know that these, among other things, are points to consider in any question involving that athletic abnegation which a possibly misguided idealism might bring about. It is all a problem in pragmatics