THE SUB-SCRUB

At the season's end, by conjectural count, seventeen nationally-known columnists will compose poems called "The Scrub". In fifteen of these the theme line will be rhymed with "sub" and "rub". Perhaps it is true that because only the imagination of a Second Team player can make tackles on Saturday afternoon, and that there is a broken heart for every play in the Stadium. One is more ready to believe, however, that this wistfulness is tempered with a homely and personal desire to whip the Yale Second Team. But whatever, the part of individual ambition in the struggle for positions on the University's two upper squads, there is yet one more squad. Low enough so that the melodies of the columnists pass unheard over its head, for even Grantland Rice never sang the sub-scrub, the class football squad at Harvard has entered into its Year IV with little flourish, and yet with a kind of distinction.

The class teams of the fall of 1925 were handicapped in practising and playing by an informality that was terrific to opponents, but of doubtful benefit to the men themselves. In 1926 Director of Athletics Bingham gave the opening chord of the athletics-for-all motif with the establishment of a class football squad, coached by former University players, thoroughly outfitted, and playing on fields of its own. Football can now be taken up at almost any time during the fall; an intensive grass drill as preliminary to each practice insures the newcomer against strain and the injuries of ill condition.

There are men on both of the higher squads, from the team which received Springfield's kickoff down, who learned football rudiment on the class fields. But the true importance of class football is in its availability to every man in Harvard College. Vicarious experience of the game is now only a matter of choice, where once there was no other. Within reach of Everyman, and probably for the last time in his life, has been brought the hard, fine joy of playing football.