"IN THE SPRING--"

Today's announcement that spring football practice will be not only more intensive and serious than ever before but also--for the first time secret, is rather surprising to those who remember the celebrated. Presidents' Agreement" of last year. The avowed purpose of this agreement was, it will be recalled, to abate a dangerously increasing, "over-emphasis" on football, of which pre-season practice, "championship" teams and "tramp athletes" were merely symptoms. As a result, all practice prior to the September opening of College was discontinued and of course, the schedules were proportionally reduced.

This intensive spring practice undoubtedly has its reasons if not justifications. Apparently, the defeat by Yale was enough to alarm the sages of Cambridge--and the lack of preseason practice was sorely felt all fall. The report that Yale has been having "spring practice in the winter" is only another proof that the dreaded bogie of over-emphasis was not annihilated once and for all by the "Presidents' Agreement."

But if it is agreed--although by some it is certainly not--that over-emphaiss is really a bad thing as the Presidents declared, the substituting of serious secret spring practice for fall practice accomplishes less than nothing toward reducing it. Instead of a perfectly natural beginning of football practice in the early fall, here is a forced, unseasonal imitation. If advertisement, rather than less publicity were desired, nothing would be better caculated to provoke it than this untimely preparation for next autumn's games.

It is well-recognized that spring practice itself is no innovation but here before it has been more or less informal and hardly seriously intended to accomplish great things for the next season, other than to give the coaches some idea of prospective material and to develop morale. But this time, intensive spring practice must balance Yale's mid-winter practice and assist in avenging last year's defeat; it must enable the team to make every game its objective all summer if they like and finally it must take the place of the forbidden fall practice! These are all honorable purposes, but it is ridiculous to believe that spring practice makes the "over-emphasis" any less acute than fall practice. And as a practical aid to winning games, it is obvious that fall practice, which conditions the squad when conditioning is valuable, can never be satisfactorily supplanted, even by spring practice in the most deadly earnest. If "over-emphasis" is still undesirable, such practice is unexcusable; and from a utilitarian point of view, it cannot conceivably accomplish what is required of it.