SURVIVAL VALUE

With the close of the football season come harrowing newspaper accounts of the injuries, fatal or incapacitating, that have occurred this fall. As usual there is ample ground for the assertion that poor coaching and improper condition are responsible for most of the fatal injuries, for only three of the deaths occurred on recognized college elevens. But the difficulty of determining the number of men engaged in the game during a given number of months vitiates part of the meaning which might be gleaned from the recorded statistics.

Harvard, however, has been too consistently free from major injury of late years, and strikingly so in the season just passed, to owe her good fortune to the mere workings of chance. Few are the squads that can boast a broken finger as the most serious accident to any member during a whole season's play. But it is just this result which the Harvard system of training is designed to produce. Though the ninety minute practice established this fall contrasts sharply with the extended arc-lit sessions common in other institutions, the Harvard team was more successful than it has been in years; and the energy conserved by curtailed practice resulted not only in increased team effectiveness but provided a satisfactory margin of power devoted to individual protection.

Added to the elimination of fatigue as a source of serious injury was the willingness of the Harvard coaches to abide by the decision of the squad surgeon in matters pertaining to the fitness of the players. Incapacitating injury is too often the result of aggrevated minor accident where instant diagnosis and treatment is not the rule. It is not by chance that the Harvard squad has been governed by a rigid code of training and conditioning; and correspondingly, it is not luck that keeps the names of Harvard men from the National roster of sacrifices to a great sport.