PROFESSIONALISM GROWING IN PREPARATORY SCHOOLS

The following extract taken from the New York Evening Post is particularly pertinent in regard to an evil which seems to be gaining firmer hold on the colleges. It discusses the growing evidence that colleges are willing to make professional athletes of schoolboys in order to induce them to play on their teams.

"There exists in football today a situation which if left unchecked by our leading universities is going to endanger sooner or later the very existence of the game. It is quite calmly accepted as a fact among college players that preparatory school stars have their price, and they discuss, as though it were a most ordinary state of affairs, a condition in which preparatory school players have come to view the game as an opportunity of some sort. The impression formulates itself clearly that many preparatory school players have come to believe they have a price and are concerned only in making the most of their good fortune.

"A preparatory school student is only human, and when he finds older men, men, it may be, who have been famous on the gridiron, engaged in keen competition for his services, he may be pardoned for developing an exalted idea of his importance. When a coach of a small college team is quoted as bragging that the eleven cost him so many thousand dollars, the previous season, what is the inference? A definite, combined effort to end this situation on the part of seats of learning which value their own self-respect and bear at the same time some regard for the mental and moral status of boys whom they receive as students, would be attended by immediate results. An association of institutions solemnly joined in compact to end, with respect to themselves at least, the present situation as regards preparatory school football players, would be attended by salutatory results, and would do more for football than anything since the establishment of the one-year residence rule."