In the Far West college track athletics were not retarded by any Puritanical scruples, but dur ing the early days there was too little chance for competition particularly to encourage their de velopment. College athletics began to make themselves felt in California during the latter eighties, however, and in 1893 the first meet was held between Stanford and Berkeley, or, as it is more commonly known in the East, the Univer sity of California. Berkeley won by the score of 91 to 35, and also won the succeeding two years. In 1896 the score was a tie, but, generally speak ing, the track athletes of the state university have thus far been more successful than those of Stanford. It was in 1895 that Berkeley felt her self strong enough to send an attacking party on a tour of conquest down East. Games were held in various places along the way, the team's record was a good one, and at Mott Haven Cali fornia won two seconds and one third. That was the year that Crum of Ohio vanquished the East ern sprinters and won both the short distances. Had it not been for those two unusual hurdlers, Bremer of Harvard and Chase of Dartmouth, two firsts instead of two seconds would have gone to California. As it was, " Father Bill " Curtis, after watching the Berkeley hurdlers run, remarked that he would never again question. a record that came from the Pacific coast.
Many excellent track men have been developed at the two big California colleges of late years. Among Stanford's men was E. E. Morgan, who first came into prominence at Portland, and who won scores of races at all sorts of games along the coast. Morgan was coast champion at one time, a I65second man in the high hurdles, and a tol erable performer at the low hurdles, high jump, and several other events. Plaw of Berkeley has held the collegiate record in the hammer-throw. Dole has done very unusual pole-vaulting, and were it not for the almost prohibitive distance between the coast and the games of the East, Berkeley and Stanford would doubtless develop teams that could compete on even terms with the college teams entered at Mott Haven. The annual meet between the two California rivals is, at present, the principal purely college track athletic event on the coast, and the coast cham pionships in which club and college athletes both compete take the place, in a way, of the Eastern intercollegiates. The time is probably not far distant, however, when the state universities will unite with Stanford and Berkeley and an associa tion will be formed providing for games in which all may be represented.
There is no space here to narrate in detail the growth of that great network of intercollegiate and interscholastic associations which now cover the country. In addition to the original " intercolle giate" association, there are a dozen or more state intercollegiate associations, and a score or more dual-meet agreements between the larger colleges.
There are intercollegiates now in Texas and in North Dakota as interesting and important to those concerned as are the dual meets of their alma maters to the undergraduates of Harvard and Yale or Stanford and Berkeley. The second ary schools and high schools are now organized on no less comprehensive lines, and there is scarcely any part of the country where school boys and collegians cannot find rivals to run with and tracks on which to run. The time has long gone by when a victory at Mott Haven makes a man a college champion except in name. The sentimental satisfaction of such victories must always be very great to the men who win them, but that no longer necessarily implies that the performances are of any higher standard than would have been required to win at home.
In looking over the growth of track sports in America three phases are apparent. In the first place, there was the vague general interest which, manifesting itself in running as in other sports, marked the beginning of that healthier appreciation of the out-of-doors which has been so typical of the last generation. Then came the starting of the athletic clubs, their amazing growth and popularity during the seventies and eighties, their final slipping into profession alism, and their decline. Lastly, the colleges, beginning with desultory cross-country runs and gradually getting together at Saratoga and Mott Haven, and later in the South, the Middle West, and in California, so developed and cleansed and strengthened the sport that when the time ar rived for the clubs to drop out there were undergraduates and schoolboys from Maine to California ready to jump into the running.
The good that has come from track athletics can hardly, I believe, be exaggerated. Other sports may be more exciting to the spectator, and more fun for the man who is in the game ; almost any man, I dare say, would rather stroke a winning crew or make a winning touchdown than win by a few inches a hundred-yard race. But no other college sport can be indulged in by so many men ; no other sport opens such possi bilities to the average man and the duffer. And it is the average man and the duffer who need looking after and need encouragement. The man who can make an eleven or a crew doesn't need any physical training. He is either already a " born " athlete or of a temperament that will get vigorous play and exercise whether or no. The track teams of our colleges and schools have not only drawn into athletics and healthy sport thousands of men who might otherwise have grown up with flaccid limbs and undeveloped lungs, but they have had their social influence as well, and to many a man who might otherwise have remained a hopeless outsider they have given the chance for which every undergraduate right fully yearns — to do something and be somebody and in some way serve his college.