SPRING FOOTBALL

This afternoon a large number of the football players or would-be players in the College gather on Soldiers Field to inaugurate the spring practice season. The question of the relative merits and defects of extending football practice to include a few weeks in the spring there-with inevitably comes to the fore.

Whether spring practice is to make football more a hectic, gruelling business or more of a normal game played primarily for the pleasure in playing it depends largely on the spirit in which the spring season is undertaken and the ends it is intended to serve. In some colleges spring practice has been a large element in reducing football to profession--a profession which claims the exclusive attention of a large number of athletes for the entire year and in which the remnants of sport for pleasure or for health are scarcely discernible. From the start of the spring season, down through summer training camps, early fall practice, the regular season, and even into a winter of gymnasium work-outs the player is harassed by a sense of duty, he is urged to devote his best efforts and his best thoughts to perfecting himself in the gridiron art, and he is told never to let his mind wander form the constant objective of all this work--victory in the big games of the coming season. Surely this is placing an emphasis on football all out of proportion to its importance in the life of any college.

On the other hand spring football can serve an entirely different end. If it is conducted solely for those men who can not keep their hands off a football whatever time of year it may be or for those who want to receive instruction in the fundamentals of the game in order that they may derive more benefit and more pleasure from future fall seasons, if practice is made informal enough so that the players are free from a heavy weight of duty and responsibility, and if the daily sessions can be regarded as fun rather than drudgery, then spring football can serve as legitimate a purpose as fall crew or fall track. It may well relieve the tension of the hectic fall preparation; and allow many players who would otherwise be lost in the rush to acquire a foundation which will greatly enhance the value of succeeding seasons whether he spend them on the University, the second, or the class teams.