E. K. HALL'S FOOTBALL REPORT OF INTEREST

Because of E. K. Hall's intimate relation with the College and with everything pertaining to Dartmouth his report as chairman of the Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee to the National Intercollegiate Athletic Association is of special interest to Dartmouth men. It should be a source of much gratification to Dartmouth men to know that one of their number plays such an important part in the direction of the most popular of athletic sports. The report follows:

"The changes in the playing rules for the season of 1924 were not in any sense fundamental. Most of them were designed to assist the officials in speeding up the game. Other changes were: One to prevent the screening of the forward pass; and one to check the tendency of using protective equipment for an individual player which might prove to be dangerous to other players.

"On the whole the results have been gratifying and have tended to justify the changes.

"The general purpose of abolishing the tees was to eliminate the delays which' were being occasioned by time consumed in collecting and shaping up the material used for tees. In this connection the Committee tried the experiment of putting back the kick-off to the 50-yard line instead of the 40-yard line as provided in the rules of recent years. This difference of ten yards on the kick-off has resulted in too many kick-offs crossing the goal line with the ball automatically coming back to the 20-yard line for the scrimmage. This has lessened the number of opportunities for running back the kick-off which is one of the most attractive features of the game. The Committee will undoubtedly consider at its next session the feasibility of restoring the spot for the kick-off to the 40-yard line.

"Every year since the rules have been in substantially their present form, the game has increased in popularity and in its possibilities. Each year it seems as if the interest in the game had reached a maximum and the next year shows even greater interest than before.

"I am satisfied that the reason for this is found in the fact that the game contains practically every element essential to the highest type of sport. It is played outdoors. It offers rare opportunity not only for physical strength, agility and speed but for mental alertness, resource and initiative. It calls for and develops confidence, courage and nerve. It affords opportunity for the exercise of all these qualities in every variation with kaleidoscopic suddenness. Its continual flashes of physical contact test the temper as almost no other game and afford continued and invaluable experience in developing its control. It develops a fine quality of sportsmanship. It teaches the value of painstaking preparation and of attention to details. And above all, it is outstandingly a team game with all of the opportunities of and rewards for team play. Up to the present time it is distinctly a game of amateurs and carries the hallmark of being the only distinctive academic sport.

"Let us not be disturbed by the criticism that in its match games it attracts too large audiences, and that the receipts roll up into large figures. Let us on the contrary be proud of a game which is so wholesome and so rare a sport that the friends of the colleges and of the game are anxious to deposit at the gates of the stadiums through their small contributions, seldom exceeding $2.00 each, an amount of money which literally is supporting practically every other branch of athletic activity in the college. This means that through the financial backing which football in its present form has made possible we are approaching a condition that we have been so universally hoping for, namely, a time when the burden of finding facilities and equipment for every branch of college sport has been lifted from those who wish to participate and opportunity opens to all. As it stands today, the receipts for football in an increasing number of colleges are carrying the expense not only of the equipment and training for football itself but for hockey, rowing, tennis, golf,' swimming, soccer, basketball and baseball to the extent which these sports inadequately fail to provide revenue. If the dream of general participation of entire student bodies in intermural athletic sports ever becomes an actuality it will be due in part to the stimulus and support of intercollegiate football.

"A score of men participate in athletics in the colleges today where one participated twenty years ago, and I take it that no one will deny that the result is an infinitely more wholesome morale in the colleges today or that the results will be found magnificently worth while in the coming generation.

"The report for the year 1924 would be incomplete without calling attention to the fact that the game as now played does not begin to put the strain on players which the old game did. One needs only to look at the schedules of 1924, which would have been deemed unthinkable a few years ago, and then note the fact that some of the teams which played the hardest schedules came up to their final games in the pink of condition.

"Considerations like these are responsible for the feeling on the part of your Committee that the Committee's task is to endeavor to hold the game as it is and to experiment with proposed changes only with extreme conservatism.