A Plea for Soccer.

[We invite all men in the University to submit communications on subjects of timely interest.]

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Mr. W. S. Seaman's article in yesterday's CRIMSON is food for much thought and I hope discussion among college undergraduates and the public at large.

In it he tells of the virtues of association football, the skill and agility required on the part of the individual plays, the team enjoyment a player gets from a game and above all the tremendous possibility it offers for general participation. Any healthy man can play soccer. It makes no difference if he stand four feet six, or six feet four, whether he weighs 125 pounds or 225 pounds. There are no signals for him to buy, no blackboard talks from coaches, pope of the hundred and one phases of training that make American football a business father than a sport. He simply joins a team of men of his own skill, puts on a pair of ruining shorts and a jersey, trois over to the field and commences to play. In an hour or less he is taking his bath and soccer has no more claim on him till the following day.

Our own game means business; spe- cial instruction for the individual players in blocking, charging, tackling, punting, blackboard talks from the coaches in the afternoons and evenings; complicated signal practice for the team with offensive and defensive formations, all for an hour or more before the game itself is played at all.

And what does the actual playing of the game amount to? For one or two days in the week perhaps twenty or twenty-five minutes of scrimmage during the earlier part of the season--in the latter part none whatever--for the rest all preliminaries, signals, talks. The danger of physical injury to the players is too great to allow them to learn the game by playing it. It must be taught them by lecture, not laboratory methods.

Yet we (the college at large) are keenly interested. We read the papers, for "dope," as we cannot attend the secret practice, and we know that the "dope" we read is mostly "fake." We guess, compare scores, hear rumors from other colleges, and gradually work ourselves into a fever of excitement before the match game with Yale.

A visitor from Mars might really think that it all amounted to something and made some difference, and so it would if more than a handful of the members of the University were getting any healthy exercise and good out of it. A small band of picked athletes are being trained and exercised, some think too much, but nevertheless it is exercise and fresh air, while the University at large sits back and "dopes" it out. And yet the fearful storm of controversy over the game and the feverish excitement before the big battles--and only thirty men out of a possible 2,000 are deriving any out benefit--it is to laugh!

Of course there are minor sports for men not physically qualified for football and unquestionably more undergraduates take part in some branch of athletics now than twenty or seven ten years ago. But why all this energy and organization and concentration of the most expert coaching on the thirty or so men who need exercise and health and physical development least?

Soccer came from England. The English have their faults but they have lived a good many generations and there is philosophy in their lives--also in their sports. There is philosophy in soccer. Its a great game for Tom, Dick and Harry, to play at school, at college, and when they begin to develop thin hair and curly figures. Soccer deserves to be popular in America. There's a reason.  R. A. DERBY '05.