A Centennial View of
the Student Experience at the
University of Chicago
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Women's field hockey participants, 1931. Veterans of regular interclass contests, the field hockey players assembled on the steps of Ida Noyes Hall in 1931 included second-year captain Katherine Dierssen (PhB 1933), front row left; fourth-year captain Ruth Lyman, front row center; first-year captain Ada Espenshade, middle row, second from left; and third-year captain Esther Feuchtwanger (PhB 1933), top row center. |
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Psi Upsilon intramural football team, 1965. Psi Upsilon won the intramural football title to lead the fraternity to the All-University championship awarded to the team with the highest cumulative IM point total. Unlike the IM football teams of twenty years earlier, intramural players in the 1960s abandoned the use of helmets and pads, although they kept the bumps and bruises. |
Physical Culture and Athletics
Intramurals
When President Harper decided
to create an intercollegiate sports program, he was determined to field
quality teams around which the student body and the administration could
rally. At the same time, he was concerned about the effect spectator sports,
especially football, would have on the athletic activities of the average
student. Instead of participating in the sports he felt were essential
for development, students, he feared, would be satisfied with the vicarious
thrill of watching their Maroon teams.
Harper's concerns were quickly alleviated by an enormous level of student interest in athletic activity. A formal intramural (IM) sports program was not created until 1924, but in the interim male students were involved in a host of interfraternity and club sports, and women participated in basketball, baseball, ice and field hockey, roller and ice skating, tennis, golf, fencing, and swimming, all at a low budget and all at the intra-University level.
These students did not invent intramural sports, but the IM program implemented in 1924 was modeled, in breadth and structure, around the prior experience of women's athletics and men's fraternity and club sports.
The year-long intramural agenda created by the IM Board was divided among the quarters and by major and minor sports. Touch football, basketball, and track headed the list and produced the most points toward the overall intramural championship. Minor sports like bowling, wrestling, and a hybrid sport called water basketball were worth half as many points toward the coveted championship.
Organized intramural play was an instant success. Competition between fraternities and residence halls and among individuals for intramural prizes was intense, and participation among male students was generally around 70 percent. (No figures were kept for women's participation.) The Cap and Gown asserted that IM sports were part of the life of "the average male student of the university." Intramurals had become so much a part of the students' athletic routine that when football was dropped in 1939, tackle football was immediately added to the intramural program.