Coe College vs. Iowa State

It didn't take me too long since my last post to come up with a nominee for the first-ever intercollegiate field hockey game in the United States. The October 11, 1906 issue of the Coe College Cosmos contains an account of a game between the women's field hockey teams of Coe College and Iowa State (referred to in the article as "Ames.") The game is reported to have taken place on Friday, October 5, 1906 in Ames, with host Iowa State winning, 4-2.

First?

In an effort to add more detail to what I already know about early field hockey at the YMCA Training School (now known as Springfield College), I've been scouring that institution's collection of digitized publications from the 1890s and 1900s. In doing so I think I may have pinned down the first organized college field hockey game ever played in the United States.

Iowa

George Baird Affleck played field hockey at the YMCA Training School (now Springfield College) under James McCurdy in 1901. After his graduation that year, Affleck became director of physical training at the Iowa State Normal School (later known as the Iowa State Teachers College, now Northern Iowa University). He stayed in Iowa through 1907, then returned to the Training School until his retirement in 1941. In Springfield he coached the men's soccer team from 1909 to 1928, and was awarded the college's Tarbell Medallion for outstanding service in 1944.

Research

Last week I had the good fortune to gain access to a dissertation titled "Field Hockey in American Education with Special Emphasis on the Colleges of the Northeastern United States," written in 1960 by Bernard Dolat of the Columbia Teachers College. Reading it has made me feel good about what I have done so far -- there were no major people or events of which I hadn't already learned, but there were plenty of leads for new research to fill in the details of what I already know. One thing that struck me was the degree to which I, using computer searches and the internet, have identified almost all of the same major primary sources as Dolat, who I'm sure needed to put in a heck of a lot more legwork to discover the identical materials.

American Field Hockey Literature in the Early 1900s

A number of publications regarding field hockey were released in the United States in the first few years of the 20th century. Before Constance Applebee’s arrival in the United States, a volume entitled The Games of Lawn Hockey, Tether Ball, Squash Ball, Golf-Croquet was released in 1900 as part of the American Sports Publishing Company's Spalding’s Athletic Library series. It included an essay on the sport by Thomas J. Browne, a description of its play by Springfield College graduate Martin Foss, and the “official” American rules by James McCurdy.

But wait, there's more...

As described in my most recent post, I now know that men were playing field hockey at Springfield College in the 1890s. But can I at least say with certainty that no women played the sport at a U.S. college before Constance Applebee’s arrival in 1901? Maybe not.

What the accepted origin story leaves out

It is impossible to overstate Constance Applebee's importance with regards to the early history of college field hockey in the United States. Her boundless energy and evangelical zeal for the sport changed the landscape of female athletics in this country forever. But the idea that field hockey didn’t exist on college campuses in the United States before her arrival in 1901 turns out to be not entirely true.

Constance Applebee at Mount Holyoke

In a previous post, I mentioned that I hadn’t been able to confirm Constance Applebee's reputed visit to Mount Holyoke during her original tour of women’s colleges in 1901. Almost every retelling of Applebee’s story that I have found includes Holyoke with Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Radcliffe and Wellesley as part of her original circuit. But I thought it was odd that I hadn’t been able to find any contemporary accounts of her visit there while the other schools had proved relatively easy to confirm. Among the only references I’d found regarding hockey at Holyoke in that era was this less-than-promising nugget from the November 1904 issue of The Mount Holyoke:

“Field hockey seems to have died out here; in many other schools it is played regularly.”

NCAA Field Hockey Championships

The NCAA Division I and Division III field hockey championship games were held Sunday, and both were won by the same schools that won the very first NCAA championships 33 years earlier.

Fact-checking a 113-year-old story

Very soon after beginning my research I came across several versions of the same basic story regarding field hockey’s arrival in the United States. It seems that the sport was quite popular among men and women in England during the late 19th Century, but it wasn’t played at all in the United States until an English woman named Constance Applebee arrived in 1901. Applebee attended the summer session in physical training at Harvard that year, and staged a field hockey demonstration for her fellow students in a courtyard outside the Hemenway Gymnasium. That fall she was invited to six of the Seven Sisters colleges to teach field hockey, at which time it took off as a women’s college sport.

The General Idea

Why is field hockey predominantly considered a women’s sport in the United States when the rest of the world doesn’t think of it that way at all? And how did the game come to be played at colleges around the country in the fall as what seems like a sort of Title IX-era female counterbalance to football? There has to be a story there – what is it?