THE COACH AND THE COLLEGE

The recent ruling of the New England Association of College Presidents directing baseball coaches to sit in the grand stands during all games is the opening gun in their campaign to reduce the importance of athletics in American universities. Realizing the fallacy in the well-known assertion that "the best advertisement for a college is a winning team", the presidents of Amherst, Bates, Hamilton, Trinity, and Wesleyan have attempted an additional reform by insisting that their coaches be regular members of the teaching faculty.

It has already become apparent that this new system is not entirely without faults. Instead of obtaining the best coach possible for the money at hand, the problem has now the additional complication of finding a good coach who is also qualified to act as an instructor. Granting, however, that such a rara avis could be secured, it is difficult to see how the importance of the sport in question would thereby be lessened. The popular interest in a contest is concerned not with the fact that a team coached by one expert is opposing a team coached by another, but that two great universities are meeting on the athletic field.

The theory of having coaches sit in the grand stand, like that of eliminating early season practise, will undoubtedly do much toward making the game more of a sport and less of a science, but it will hardly be effective in reducing the importance of the outcome. Before that can be satisfactorily accomplished, the entire outlook both of the student body and of the alumni must undergo a radical transformation--which is a task not for the presidents, but for the psychologists.