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There is one more point that needs to be made clear before the Athletic Committee takes action on the winter sport question. Throughout this unfortunate discussion the Faculty has taken great pains to point out individually on every possible occasion that it is not as a body hostile to athletics. In every instance intercollegiate contests have been carefully distinguished.
The undergraduates, on the other hand, have maintained that such a distinction is not altogether possible, and that any action that cripples intercollegiate sports will cripple the so-called "intramural" as well. We hear a great deal about ideal athletic conditions in England and we are asked to imitate their system of general participation. This we are trying to do; but once abolish the intercollegiate element and what will become of the sport as a whole?
An old Harvard oarsman and ex-captain of the hockey team, who has since studied at Oxford and has there taken part in athletics writes to the CRIMSON as follows:
"Without doubt winter sports have a right to live, and none more so than hockey. But to abolish intercollegiate contests altogether will certainly kill this game. Intracollegiate athletics cannot exist without a varsity team which the contestants hope sometime to make.
"The English system of Intracollegiate athletics would not continue, or even exist, were it not that the best men of each college are continually sent up for a trial on the varsity. Their athletics would fail, in spite of the strong feeling between the colleges, were it not for these trials."
If, in a university composed of solid units, between which there is the keenest rivalry, intracollegiate athletics are dependent upon inter-university competition, how much more dependent must they be in a community such as ours.
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