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the rise of organized youth sports
well before 1890 youth had participated in sports, but usually on teams and in games that they organized themselves. After 1890 the YMCA (young men's christian association, private prepatory schools, churches, the public schools athletic leagues, the city playground associations,a dn the public high schools, who almost all reflected old-stock, protestant, middle-class concerns, bacme major sponsors of boy's sports. girls were also apart of the youth organized sports boom, but on a smaller scale. -
adult drive
the drive for adult-directed sports was an essential part of a bigger movement to organize and manage the spare-time activities of the nation's youth. Particularly, the adult leaders concluded, boys' sports could build character. Sports could play a huge role to the character-building enterprise and good citizenship by filling the voids because the children didn't have things to do at home. -
new society
The most concerned for the fate of youth believed that the new urban-industrialized society had dealt harshly with the old way of child rearing. The new society had weakened the family as a nurturing place. Earlier in the nineteenth century, children helped their parents in spinning thread, weaving cloth, making garments, fabricating tools, constructing furniture, baking bread, or pursuing their fathers trade. -
new society continued
After 1890 most families purchased their essential items in the marketplace. Father now was away from home most of the time, so the children were left with dull, routine chores, with "make-work" that in the view of reformers failed to exercise their "constructive impulses in a wholesome way." -
YMCA growing
By the 1890s, the YMCA had become the outstanding institutional expression of muscular christianity among evangelical Protestants. Founded by laymen in England in 1851 and brought over to the US after the Civil war. -
YMCA still growing
The original purpose was to offer spiritual guidance and practical assistance to the young men who were filling the cities. But after the Civil War, the local YMCAs began to expand their programs. Instead of young displaced males, the main members of the YMCAs became young men from the clerical classes (bookkepers, stenographers, clerks,and salesmen), business men, and boys from the middle and upper-income ranks. By 1892 the YMCA membership had grown to nearly a quarter of a million. -
modern life
to the advocates of the idea that sports could be employed as a powerful tool in building good character and citizenship, modern life had become too soft and effeminate. Frontiers and battlefields no longer existed to test how manly they all were. Henry W. Williams said that the "struggle for existence, though becoming harder and harder, is less and less a physical struggle, more and more a battle of minds." -
modern life continued
Apart from sports , men no longer had arenas for testing their manliness. theodore roosevelt worried lest prolonged periods of peace would encourage "effeminate tendencies in young men." Only aggresive sports could create the "brawn, the spirit, the self-confidence, and quickness of men" that was essential for the existence of a strong nation. -
Luther Halsley Gulick Jr.
Born of missionary parents, Gulick waged a "determined war" against the "subjective type of religion" fostered by piestic Protestants. He was against the formal religious doctrines of his parents, he retained a zest for embarking crusades. He became the champion of muscular christianity within the YMCA, a major proponent of a new theory of play, thr founder of the Public Schools Athletic League in New York City, an organizer and the first president of the Playground Association of America. -
Luther Halsey Gulick Jr. continued
Gulick invented the famous emblem of the YMCA, the inverted triangle which symbolized the spirit supported by the mind and the body. Unlike previous YMCA leaders, Gulick welcomed the introduction of sport into YMCA programs. For the first time the YMCA also held track and field, swimming, gymnastics, basketball, and volleyball. -
Athletic League of North America
basketball had become one of the most pooular sports at the YMCA. Many people joined to play the sport and be on a team. Unfortunatly teh game was played with such agression. It threatened other sports being able to be held in the gym. Other YMCAs didn't take such drastic steps to get rid of this problem, but gulick did. In 1895, the YMCA formed the Athletic League of North America with Gulick as secretary. To curtail excesses teh league joined the Amaeur Athletic Union, and developed rules. -
Private and Public High Schools
Public high schools and private academies also became major centers of adult-supervised sports. Sports at private schools were organized by adults, and public schools usually had students start the teams. Moreover, high school sports helped give an identity and common purpose to many neighborhoods, towns, and cities which were otherwise divided by class, race, ehtnicity, or religion. -
The Playground Movement
The early twentieth-century movement for city playgrounds furnished Gulick and his followers with even broader opportunities for implementing their evolutionary theory of play. Before 1900, a few private citizens ans charity groups had organized playgrounds. Usually consisting of sandpiles and simple play equipment, for the less fortunate youth. -
PSAL
After leaving the YMCA training school in 1900 and serving for three years ar principal of Pratt Institue High School in Brooklyn, Gulick, became the director of physical training of the public schools of Greater New York City in 1903. Gulick quickly determined that "all the boys in the city needed the physical benefits and moral and social lessons afforded by properly conducted games" So, he formed The Public Schools Athletic League. -
Playground Improvement
A turning point came in 1903 when the voters of the Chicago South Park district approved a $5 million bond issue for the construction of ten parks. Unlike previous efforts, the Chicago system included field houses at each park with a gymnasium for both boy and girls. -
PSAL continued
Ethnic youngsters exhibited a lack of understanding of American values and institutions. A carefully managed sport program, the founders believed , would reduce juvenile delinquency and "Americanize" the ethnic youth of the ghettos. By 1910, the PSAL, which was hailed as the "world's greatest athletic organization," had at least 17 imitators in other large American cities. -
YMCA compitition
The league failed to ensure teh "purity" of YMCA athletic programs. By 1905, YMCA teams regularly played over 2,000 games with outside competitors. In their contests with the collegians and athletic clubs, the Y athletes had great success. For more then 12 years the Buffalo German YMCA tean dominated championship basketball. They won the Buffalo Exposition tournament in 1901 and won the gold medal at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis. -
change in the YMCA
Several years after Gulick left the YMCA, the association changed the entire focus of its athletic programs. Henry F. Kallenberg, the new physical director at Springfield recommened a radical break from past practices. The Y, Kallenberg argued, should promote a comprehensive sport program that would reach the "mass of young men and boys, and discourage prize winning and overtraining." At Kallenbergs initive, the league severed its relationship with the AAU and began to organize a local league. -
Conclusion
The adult-directed youth sports movement of 1890-1920 era changed many ways about how they lived. Youth had a chance to enjoy sports on their own time and at school.
