Читать книгу Alternative Models of Sports Development in America. Solutions to a Crisis in Education and Public Health онлайн

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After the first official organized football game, pitting Rutgers against Princeton in 1869, proved to be very popular among the students and alumni as a social event, the faculties of the two schools canceled the following year’s contest because they feared an overemphasis on athletics as opposed to academics (Funk 1991; Zimbalist 1999). This strong faculty intervention might be one of the few times, if not the last, that university faculty exercised such control over the growth and power of college sports. Later, and to the disgust of the faculty, representatives of athletic interests (commonly known today as “boosters”) from both schools tried to leverage the very popular contest to raise funds to acquire property to build their own football fields. The 1883 game, played at the Polo Grounds in New York City, drew more than ten thousand fans and generated the money for the boosters to pay for the new fields. For the first time, intercollegiate sports were beginning to dictate university policy and conflict with academia in ways not even imagined (Zimbalist 1999).