150-POUND FOOTBALL

The decision has finally been reached by the Harvard Athletic Association to retain the one hundred and fifty pound football team for another year, despite the vote of the Student Council to discontinue it, as a hindrance to the success of the House Football teams in their initial year. There are three valid reasons for the lightweight football team: it offers outside competition for a group of men physically unable to compete with an unlimited squad; Princeton will probably enter the field next year, making two opponents; and it is logical to continue a lightweight football team as well as the 150-pound crew, even though, as the Student Council report pointed out, it has not the same basis of tradition.

Obviously, any objection other than financial, to a larger number of men competing against other colleges must be the correspondingly diminished number of candidates for the House teams. Such an argument will not, of course, have a consistent value; in a few years when the Houses will have arrived at a permanent footing in their athletic personnel, the larger men will monopolize the squads as they have in the past. In this instance, when it will be numerically impossible to organize a separate 150-pound team for each House, the lightweight University team will be a convenient medium for the little man.

The result, nevertheless, of the solution for non-interference with House-Plan athletics next year, the organization of the seven House teams before issuing a call for the 150's, should be an interesting development. In its way, it should prove a smaller replica of the coming conflict between the regular University team, and House athletics. If a man desires a minor sports award it is futile to suppose he will be enticed into representing his House when, a week or two later at the most, he can begin preparations to compete against Princeton and Yale as a member of the lightweight football team.

House athletics on a decidedly informal basis can be successful; the informal rugby team bears witness to that. But the slightest insinuation of House patriotism must cause a potential candidate the slight reflection that he may as well represent the University. The struggle next year between the Houses and the lightwight football team will be interesting not only for itself; it will be an earnest of future Harvard athletics, and should decide, for this college generation at least, how important a stimulus the major and minor sports awards really are.