Changes in Water-polo and Swimming-race Rules.
Radical changes in the rules that came up for consideration were passed upon favorably at the annual meeting of the Intercollegiate Swimming Association held at the New York Athletic Club a few days ago. Most of them affected water polo, and all were proposed by the graduate advisory board, a committee created last winter, when the managers and captains of the various college teams, after encountering all sorts of trouble with the rules in vogue, decided the matter ought to be placed in the hands of competent and experienced veterans of the sport.
The work of this committee, judging from the report, was thorough. Water polo came in for most of their attention, they asserted, because it was that division that had created most dissatisfaction. With an eye toward making the contests less one-sided than heretofore, the board ruled that in future the ball be given to the team scored against after each goal.
A second change was the substitution of three periods for two in every game, to alleviate the tax on the strength and stamina of the players, and another was an amendment permitting a player to return to the game after he had once been withdrawn. The object of the latter ruling is to decrease the size of the visiting squad and thereby reduce their traveling expenses. The value of this change cannot be overestimated, for the matter of expenses has been the bugbear that has retarded the development of the sport among the colleges.
The elimination of the one and a half Flying Dutchman from the list of legal dives was another important amendment. The dive was considered too dangerous for collegians, several serious accidents having resulted at dual meets within the last few years.
There was one subject, however, over which the advisory board and the college representatives failed to agree, and that was the question of eliminating the plunge from the list of events to make room for the back stroke. The board favored the change on the ground that the plunge was not an interesting event from a spectator’s standpoint, that it did not develop swimmers, and that it had been stricken off national and Olympic programs. The back stroke was one style of swimming at which Americans had been beaten easily at the last Olympic meet. The delegates, however, voted to refuse the change principally because most of the colleges had first-class plungers on their squads—men capable of winning points.
No other colleges having requested admission into the association, the championship tournament will again be limited to Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Columbia, and the College of the City of New York. To interest other universities in the sport it was agreed to add a special fifty-yard event for all colleges outside of the association in the championship meet.