II. SPORTS AND COLLEGE SPIRIT
We now turn to a less difficult matter, yet an interesting and important one. The past year has been a big sports year for Dartmouth. We don't have to mention the main reason why! But the baseball team, with its record of eleven wins out of twelve league starts, is another good reason. And the winter sports team, both Olympic and Hanover sections, is a third.
Athletics at Dartmouth are definitely on the upswing. Two and a half years ago they were in almost as bad a trough as they were at Princeton just before the Crisler era. But the appointment of the new football coaches seemed to change the luck. Right after that the hockey team, under Herb Gill's first year of coaching, walked away with the championship of the new Quadrangular League. The new football team, after marking time for one season, turned in a record which has become history. And in the meantime the baseball team was putting on its great performance, and breaking all league records in the process. The winter sports team has always maintained a high record for itself, but the record was unusually good this winter, despite the loss of four of last year's stars, three of them still undergraduates, to the American Olympic team in Germany.
Interestingly enough, the general college spirit seems to have improved noticeably along with the rise in athletic fortunes. It seems to be an inescapable fact that the morale at a man's college bears a direct relationship to the success with which the athletic program is functioning.
This new spirit was evident in the performance of the hockey and basketball teams this winter and in the undergraduate attitude toward these teams. Neither team was conceded a chance of winning its league title at the start of the season, and yet both turned out' to be serious threats and finished in high positions, playing consistently above their heads.
The new spirit doesn't seem to demand winning teams, but principally a good performance. On the last basketball game of the season, with Princeton at Hanover, when there was not even a mathematical chance to win the league, the team got as staunch and enthusiastic a backing from the stands as we have ever seen down in the court.
As a part of this movement, the zest for intramurals has also increased. Indicative of the improved standard in these sports was the "extramural" meet with Harvard held here recently. For the first time the Dartmouth intramural champions won, and handily, in all three departments of the meet, boxing, wrestling, and basketball.
Dean Robert C. Strong '24 Who is this month making up his final list of members of the Class of 1940, to enter in September. He is also Dean of Freshmen.
