And then there was a great jolt, and the Ark floated off on the flood.
[to be continued.]
The interscholastic matches at Newport promise to be more interesting this year than ever before. The game put up by the various players who are to represent the schools in the national tournament has been of so much higher an order than that of any previous season, that it has attracted more than the usual amount of attention from sportsmen not directly interested in the schools. There is better material blossoming this August than has come forward for many years, and most of it is coming out of the schools. The new players who are making themselves prominent are all young men—not men who have been playing many years and have finally developed skill. Thus it is very evident that the formation of the Interscholastic Tennis Association has been a good thing, and if properly supported—as I have no doubt it will be—it is bound to aid materially the progress and refinement of the game. It means the early development of good players and a higher standard in inter-collegiate tennis. Already interscholastic tennis, in its first champion, has given us a national representative who last year saved our trophy from foreign hands.
The history or the movement may be summed up in few words. It was initiated by the Harvard University Lawn-Tennis Club at the suggestion of its secretary, William D. Orcutt, in 1891, when the first tournament was held upon the college grounds, Saturday, May 2d, ten schools having replied to the circulars and letters by sending representatives—twenty-five in all. The tournament, played off in two days without a default, was won by R. D. Wrenn, of the Cambridge Latin School, and created no small amount of interest both in college and schools as the large audience at the courts testified. From this beginning grew the idea of an Interscholastic Association, with an annual tournament as a national fixture. In 1892, therefore, Harvard sent out further circulars inviting preparatory schools to send representatives to a second tournament, to be held under the auspices of the United States National Lawn-Tennis Association, by the Harvard Club, with the intention of forming a permanent association of the schools at a meeting to be called on the day of the tournament. In response sixty-six entries were received, representing at least twenty-four schools. The tournament, held May 7th, was won by M. G. Chace, another who has since distinguished himself among our ranked players, and afterwards, as had been proposed, the association was formed.
The formation of the Harvard Interscholastic Association was an incentive to other colleges to attempt similar organizations, and in 1893, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia started such associations, and held tournaments. The four winners of these events met that year in Newport, at the time of the national tournament, to determine the Interscholastic champion, and again in 1894, after similar preparatory tournaments.
The following table shows the Interscholastic champions up to date: