Those college-men who set to work in August, gathering at the training-table a month before the term opens, are making a business of football. They are devoting their energies to the sport for the sake of winning, and not for the pleasure they get from playing. And this sort of thing is bad for athletics, and bad for that particular branch of athletics which becomes the victim of summer training. Nevertheless, there are cases where a little preliminary thought and work may be of service—I mean especially with captains of teams, or with half-backs and quarter-backs, who have the ambition to make their school or college teams, but who feel that they have not had enough experience as yet to feel sure that their work in the fall will assure them of the place.
It is a very different thing if an individual, or two individuals, at their homes in the country, choose to kick a football over an improvised goal-post, or choose, two or three times a week, to go out on the grass and fall on the ball, or to go out in the road and run a few miles to improve their wind. It is a different thing from getting eleven men together for concerted work. In fact, it is well for the amateur sportsmen who recognize their own weaknesses to try to remedy them at home in the early fall. This is not making a business of sport—it is rather developing a healthy interest and ambition.
Captains of teams, as I have said before, can spend several weeks prior to the opening of the school term in reading and learning the rules of the game, and in planning out plays and tricks which they think can be effective against their opponents. The captain of a school team has usually played one year or more on his school's eleven, and is consequently more or less familiar with the style of play of the other schools in his league; and by giving thought to the work as he has seen it performed by each one of his rivals, he may very well be able to develop some sort of counter-strategy which shall prove most effective later in the season.
Recognizing the fact that the school captains all over the country will probably wish to be giving some consideration to the new season from now on, this Department will shortly begin a series of four papers on the science of football, and on this game as it is to be played this year, illustrating the text with photographs and diagrams. But before we begin with the theory of the game, it will probably be well to touch lightly upon training and practice.
Let us assume that the majority of school teams will be getting together toward the end of September. At that season of the year, especially after a long summer vacation, in which, if there has been any exercise taken at all, it has been exercise of an entirely different kind from football, most of the players will be soft, and their muscles will need hardening. During the first few days practice should not exceed more than twenty-five minutes at a stretch. It should consist of dropping on the ball, and of snapping the ball back from the centre to the quarter, and of passes from the half-backs to the full-back and to one another. A little running, for wind, is also advisable.
The running should not be of the long-distance kind to begin with, but sprinting, and very short sprints at that. A good way is to line the whole team up across the field, and to have them sprint to the 25-yard line. This might be done twice a day—once at the beginning of the practice, and once at the end. As the days go by, the second sprint can be lengthened, until the men are required to run as far as the 50-yard line, and a week or so later they should be made to run the entire length of the field.
Where it is possible, the players should return home from the field on which they have been practising at a swinging trot, and upon reaching their various rooms they should bathe and rub down so as to avoid stiffness resulting from the new exercise. It ought not to be necessary for me to say that football-players, and especially young football-players, should make a point of getting to bed early—before ten o'clock, if possible—and of rising regularly in the morning.
After this preliminary work has been going on for a week or two, more serious practice can be undertaken. The candidates should be divided into squads, the centres and quarter-backs, the half-backs and the line-men working together. Practice may now be kept up for three-quarters of an hour each afternoon, the backs, of course, devoting themselves to punting and catching, whereas the line-men work at breaking through, and at tackling, and at falling on the ball. Not more than half of the time devoted to practice should be spent in playing the game itself; but in that time, when the two teams, the first and the scrub, are opposed to one another in regular football array, they should play as hard and as carefully as if they were indulging in a contest with some strong rival.
On alternate days the scrub team should keep the ball in its possession constantly, in order that the first team may get practice in defensive play. On the other days the first team should hold the ball, in order to develop the strategy of offensive work. It is also well, as the season grows older, to have the regular half-backs play on the scrub team, in order that the rush-line players of the first team may have the advantage of playing against the best backs their schools can turn out.
H. P. Boardman, Burlington, Vt.—You can get the information you ask for in Zimmerman's book on bicycling. Any dealer in sporting goods can secure the book for you.