Varsity Athletics and the High School

By GUY E. REED

HAT you can do for the success of our present varsity teams in the university, you can do for the future varsity teams in the high school. Don't forget that the major portion of our athletic stars were once most unpromising material in our high schools!

      When our university athletic department extends its activities into the high schools of the state, it will only be following that bigger and broader policy which is sure to bring athletic supremacy for all time. Nebraska's climate breeds the sturdiest of physical manhood. Nebraska industries, practically all carried on in the open air, build up that physical manhood to a remarkable degree. Why should not our state be supreme in every phase of athletic competition? Give us the equipment, the coaches and the proper spirit, and success is a foregone conclusion.

      "A successful team is assured if material in the student body, spirit in the university, and good coaching are present, yet I believe that the material is 80%, the spirit and the coaching only 20%", says Coach Stiehm, who has for four years given us championship football teams.

      In addition to the good coaching and good university spirit, to what can you attribute Nebraska's success? Without doubt it is to the policy which the university pursues in relation to high school athletics. It has not been only a policy which the athletic authorities have pursued, but efficient service by the alumni and students.

      Old varsity men have gone back to the high school to teach real football and above all to spread the gospel that the abilities exercised in being able to accomplish physical feats are as much attributes of the noble mind as an appreciation of literature or a conception of philosophy. What are the results? We find that about eighty high schools of the state are maintaining football teams, one hundred and eighty of them basketball teams, fifty of them baseball teams, and between forty and fifty competing in track and field athletics. Within the university it is possible to find two such teams as we had five and six years ago.

      The work has only begun, however. The university plans to some day publish a magazine dedicated to sane, competitive athletics. It hopes to be able within a few years to entertain the athletes of the state in one of the finest equipped gymnasiums in the west. The high school basketball tournament, which is now the largest in America, must pass the hundred mark in the number of entries. Track athletics have been neglected. There is to be a systematic campaign carried on throughout the state to interest high schools in this line of sports, which are emphasized in our Olympic games.

     The opponents of competitive athletics are beginning to see the fallacy in the charge that they are for only the few and most highly developed, and therefore a bad thing. It is true that they alone keep alive before the youth of America the concrete ideal of what it means to be efficient in a physical sense. What may seem a hardship on these particular athletes is a blessing in disguise to the growing youngster. These men are his heroes, and in order that he may sometime emulate their deeds he starts early and unconsciously builds up a sturdy physical manhood.