AMATEURIZING ATHLETICS

Obstreperous journalists, undergraduate and metropolitan, might well undergo a certain amount of chest expansion at the news that one of their chance shots at improving the existent system of college athletics, has taken effect. Massachusetts Agricultural College is the proving ground: the goat is basketball, or possibly the captain of that sport, who is to give the idea of student coaching a workout this season. If the basketball teams from the Amherst college had been engaged in rolling up records for consecutive losses, this decision might be condoned as a last desperate measure before the oblivion of a dropped sport; but M. A. C. has had teams that could not even be dismissed with the epithet of faint praise "good small college outfits."

Beyond doubt, then, this experiment is being entered upon seriously. It is, moreover, going to get the fairest possible trial, for a tradition of victory and a small college especially intent on this sport are helpful auguries to prove the contentions of the give-the-game-back-to-the-boys columnists. This one opening, however--and its success is still far from certain--can mean little in such a campaign. Ten thousand alumni basketball teams assemble annually to battle ten thousand school teams. Hockey and football, more dependent on carefully pre-outlined systems of attack and defence; track and crew, relying on ultra-scientific training; these are far too complex for a mere player to teach as he plays; and wasn't there, sometime, somewhere, a lament about the overburdened college athlete?