A Centennial View of
the Student Experience at the
University of Chicago
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Fencing team, 1911. In the back row, beginning second from right, are dueling swords captain Frank Walter Hannum (SB 1912), coach A. M. de Beauviere, and foils captain David Levinson (PhB, JD 1912). Photograph by Martyn. |
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Track team members, AAU national championship games, Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. Left to right: Henry Binga Dismond (SB 1917), LeRoy Campbell (PhB 1916, JD 1919), Coach Stagg, Herman Stegeman (PhB 1915), John Breathed (SB 1915), and Duerson Knight (SB 1916). |
Physical Culture and Athletics
The
Full Range of Sports
The end of football also discouraged
some prospective student athletes from attending the University of Chicago
for fear that all sports would either be dropped or become uncompetitive.
As a result, the Maroons were soon overwhelmed by their Big 10 foes, and
by 1945 the University of Chicago withdrew from the conference.
Women's athletics did not fare as well as men's in the University's early days. Intercollegiate matches were prohibited for women, even though they were active in almost all of the same sports as men and competed in intra-University tournaments. Women were also given considerably less adequate athletic facilities, practicing in the gloomy confines of Lexington Hall's gymnasium. The administration had promised in 1903 to build a women's facility, and the Women's Athletic Association (WAA), directed by Gertrude Dudley, conducted charity drives like the Penny Race and a winter vaudeville to help generate the funds needed for a new gym. Finally, in 1916, the University made good on its promise with the construction of Ida Noyes Hall. Another sixty years would pass before University of Chicago women athletes were able to compete at the intercollegiate varsity level. The success of women's teams in recent years, particularly in basketball, has been a source of justifiable pride.
In 1976, the University joined the Midwest Collegiate Athletic Conference before moving in 1986 to help form the University Athletic Association, an organization of like-minded private research universities committed to the primacy of education over athletic prowess. The University's Division III men's and women's teams have given a broad spectrum of students the opportunity to participate in varsity sports, and they remain an important part of student life.