As has been chronicled in this Department, Madison High-School at one time allowed two players on its football team to take courses at the university while still attending school. The fact that they attended the university at all should have disqualified these men; but the Madisonians did not interpret the rules in that way. Now, however, they have come to see that this sort of thing involves a principle, and that it cannot be allowed.
The past season, therefore, so far as I am able to find out, the Madison High-School team has been made up strictly of students of the school, and the players have taken up football for the sport of the game, rather than for the sake of the empty honor of a championship. This "championship" business is getting to be very much overestimated and exaggerated, and may eventually do much harm to sport; but this is another subject, and we shall have to come back to that at another time.
The Madison High-School team had a uniformly successful season this fall, although, because of its reputed strength on the gridiron, its managers found some difficulty in securing games with other high-school teams. The Madisonians were therefore compelled to arrange a number of games with elevens which might not ordinarily be considered in their class. For the second time they defeated the St. John's Military Academy team, the only eleven which has ever defeated Madison H.-S.,—barring the university team.
The strongest opponents they met were the Minneapolis H.-S. eleven. Five days after this hard game they played a team which came up from Chicago, representing the Hyde Park High-School, but I have never been able to find out what percentage of the members of this eleven ever saw the inside of a Hyde Park school-room. The managers and players of the team were not above practising deception either, for some of their men played against Madison under assumed names.
The Madison newspapers, it seems, had some fault to find with the method of play indulged in by the Chicagoans, and accused several of them of slugging. Full-back Trude was one of the men who received a raking over the coals. A few days later, however, the manager of the Madison High-School team received a letter from Mr. Trude, saying that the charges made against him were totally false, for the very simple reason that he was not in Madison on Thanksgiving day. Who the young man was who masqueraded as Trude and played full-back for the Hyde Park team I do not know.
This incident goes to show what serious results may come from what young men at first consider as merely innocent deception—if any deception may be considered as innocent. Many parents of Chicago school football-players objected this year to the game, and signified their unwillingness to have their sons take part in it. A number of these boys, however, disregarded these wishes, and played football under assumed names. In fact, it got to be quite a joke among Chicago high-schools that a number of boys had two names—their real name, and their "football" name. Of course, a few months of this sort of business hardened the unscrupulous players, and was no doubt indirectly responsible for the deception practised by Hyde Park upon Madison High-School.
Four of the members of the successful Madison High-School team graduate this year, but a good nucleus is left to start in with next fall. The average weight of the eleven was 143 pounds, and the average age, I am told, was 16½ years. This seems very young to us in the East, where boys remain at school until they are considerably older, or, perhaps, do not get to school until they are more advanced in age. With teams averaging between sixteen and seventeen years there is no necessity for an age-limit rule, apparently; whereas in Boston and New York there is always an altercation when the age standard has to be decided, a strong faction regularly demanding that men of twenty-one shall be admitted to school athletics.
My opinion is, and always has been, that no one twenty-one years of age has any business being at school, unless he is extraordinarily stupid, or unless illness or a weak constitution has made it impossible for him to keep up with his studies. In either case such boys had better keep out of athletics, except for necessary light exercise, and devote all of their time to learning enough to get out of school with credit. All this is aside, and I find that I am again wandering far from the Madison High-School.
The Madisonians, to take the subject up again, did not meet any team this fall which was not considerably heavier than their own, and it is plain therefore that their victories were largely due to their team-work, and, doubtless, to the agility of their ends and the swiftness of their backs. Their eleven scored during the season 135 points to their opponents' 46.
