Recreational activities and athletics
Competitive athletics are typical of the American college. Theoretically, athletics are open to all students. Practically, in many of our colleges athletics are made available only to the student with leisure time and exceptional physique. Consistent effort is being made today by college authorities to provide opportunities for intramural (interclass, intergroup, and mass) athletics for the whole student body; at the same time preserving the desirable features of the more specialized intercollegiate competitions.
Inculcating habits of physical exercise
Physical exercise in these various forms has its immediate and valuable influence upon the health condition of the individual student, if taken in sufficient quantity. It has its lasting and very much more important influence in those cases in which physical exercise becomes a habit. It has, therefore, become the increasing concern of the college teacher of physical training to develop activities in physical exercise that the student may use after graduation. Teachers of physical training have become more and more impressed with the importance of interesting exercise, not only because interesting exercise is more likely to become habitual exercise, but also because exercise that is accompanied by the play spirit, by happiness and joy, is physiologically and therefore healthfully of very much more value to the individual. The relationship between cheerfulness and good health has become very firmly established through the scientific researches of the modern physiologist. We know that health habits which are associated with cheerfulness and happiness are bound to be more effective.
Opportunities for character building
The teacher of physical training finds opportunity for incidental and yet very important instruction leading to the formation of fine qualities of character and fine standards of personal conduct. These opportunities arise constantly in the various general types of physical exercise found in the curriculum of the department of physical training. They are especially present in those activities in which competition occurs, as in play, games, and athletics. These activities do not in themselves produce excellent qualities of character or high standards of conduct, but the teacher—whether he be called a coach or a trainer or a professor of hygiene—who sets a good example and who insists that every game played, and every contest, whether it be in a handball court between college chums or on the football field between college teams, shall be clean and fair, is using in the right way one of the opportunities present in the entire college life of the student, for the formation of fine character.
SPECIAL EXERCISES FOR SPECIAL GROUPS
In any given group of college students one will find a number of individuals in need of special or modified physical exercise. These students may be grouped commonly under the following heads: (1) undeveloped, (2) bad posture, (3) awkward, (4) originally weak, (5) deformed.
Some of these students suffer from defects that are remediable, Some of these defects are due to poor physical training in earlier years. Some are the results of disease. All of them call for modified exercise and recreation. The fact that a student may fall into one of these groups in no way justifies the assumption that he is therefore no longer subject to the laws of health or to the need for rational health habits. As a matter of fact, such cases generally call for greater care and attention in the formulation and operation of a rational policy of right living.
Every student physically able to go to college is physically able to exercise. No student in attendance on recitations anywhere can offer a rational plea for exemption from exercise, The individual whose physical condition contraindicates all forms of exercise needs careful medical advice and probably needs hospital or sanitarium treatment.