Time was - in the dawn of American college football - When the captain of a university or college football team was not obliged to share with others not members of the eleven the glory of victory or the odium of defeat. He was a law unto himself, and although he was wont to choose from among the older men of the eleven advisers upon whom he leaned more or less heavily from time to time, he remained the brains of the team. In the matter of training, what there was of it in those old days, as in the matter of the actual method of play, it was the captain to whom the men turned, and who out of his experience as an undergraduate gave advice according to his lights.

Football was comparatively simple then. Practice and fairly decent living, rather than specialization, sufficed to put a well-equipped team in the field. It was natural, however, that after a successful season the captain should return to hie alma mater to help his successor as best he might, and it was natural, too, that the captain in his ignorance in the matter of proper foods and hours for men preparing for a severe test on the gridiron should turn to some trainer who had handled professional runners abroad, or pugilists here. This latter experimenting was costly, for the old-time professional trainer was himself pretty much at sea when it came to conditioning young men who had not formed the sinister habits of the prize ring, and who had not the physique or the temperament to respond to the regimen of the professional.

The mistake in training was rectified in time, but the coaching development was from the start along sound lines, and unconsciously tended toward the foundation of a system that had as its basic principle the conservation of the accumulated knowledge of football to be handed down from generation to generation on the field.

Little by little the game grew in complications so that it was apparently beyond the power of any one man to handle a big university team from the post of captain, even with the advice of his predecessor. It followed naturally that as the years drew on more and more men returned to help out the eleven, although the advice they gave was not at first what might be strictly classified under the head of coaching as we know it to-day. It was more in the line of trick maneuvers with a view to discomfit the enemy, and indeed, the vocabulary of the writers of those days was full of the word "tricks" and its synonyms. The play was still largely individual, and so indeed was the coaching, calling it that by courtesy. Jones of Yale showed his successor how he had been able to block Smith of Harvard the previous season, and Smith retaliated in kind.

With team play still in its infancy the value of this particular coaching was problematical save that it established the fact that the old men were expected to return annually and put their shoulders to the wheel. The initiative still came from the captain. He it was who devised whatever novelties in procedure were to be used against the most important rival, and it was he who was responsible for what little concerted effort was in evidence.

But as the game progressed, and American invention began to show its hand, it became apparent that a man could not learn enough football in the course of his purely undergraduate life, to cope as captain with the leader of another eleven that had had the benefit of the accumulated knowledge of the seasons. Thus it was that coaching became thoroughly established. More and more veterans returned at the conclusion of each season, and it finally J became evident that the coaching staff, with its many specialists, was as much in need of organization as the team itself. It was an easy step, therefore, to the establishment of a head coach, who was to the other coaches what the captain was to the team.

Photo, by Paul Thompson.

Princeton Opens The Line

An excellent example of team play. A "boulevard" has been made between tackle and end of the defensive line, through which are storming two Princeton interferers with Captain Hart, carrying the ball, just behind them. The attack has struck the opening at exactly the right instant.

Of all the universities Yale has clung most tenaciously to the integrity of the captaincy, and it is within the memory of some of the youngest graduates how upon occasion a Yale captain has been able to turn away the wisest of the veteran counsellors and steer his eleven for the rocks. This happened so seldom, however, that it was not deemed wise to make a change, and in the main the system worked well. There was always Walter Camp to whom to turn in the darkest hour, and it was seldom that the captain who did turn to that fount of football wisdom came away Still athirst.

In the meantime Harvard and Princeton were building up coaching systems of their own, and as the captaincy was not held in quite so deep reverence at these two institutions as at Yale, rapid progress was made. It was not long before Yale, Harvard and Princeton were working along well established if somewhat dissimilar lines, and it was not long before their systems began to spread over the eountry. Wylie Woodruff was in the first flight of Yale coaches to take up the work at another institution, the big Yale guard going to Pennsylvania and almost at once putting the Red and Blue very much on its feet in football. Woodruff's action caused a storm of criticism at the time, but this soon died down, and his example was followed by many other Yale men, who spread the knowledge of football they had gained at New Haven all over the country, practically from coast to coast.

It was inevitable that if systematic coaching were to have 3 any lasting effect supreme control would have to pass from captain to coach; and there it remains to-day in most of the institutions of lesser gridiron rank. Thus at Yale the team captain remains supreme, while at a college like Wesleyan or Swarthmore football affairs are entirely in the hands of the coach. Recently a strong school football team in the East decided to abolish the captaincy, following the example of one of the most famous of the Eastern university crews.