Field Hockey at the YMCA Training School

As previously discussed (here, here, and here), the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts (now known as Springfield College), began its men's field hockey program in the fall of 1896. All play was intramural, as there were no other schools with which to compete at the time. The annual championship series between the class teams became a hotly anticipated event, and by 1900 the school promoted the games heavily. "The physical department committee have been especially active in trying to make hockey a drawing card this year," according to the November 13, 1900, issue of Nobody's Business, the school newspaper. "Special invitations are being sent out to the neighboring schools and academies to be present at the championship games."

Harvard's Hemenway Gymnasium

With a research trip to Cambridge, Mass. on the agenda for next week, I thought I'd look into the possibility of visiting the site of Constance Applebee's first demonstration of field hockey in the United States. The consensus of all the accounts I have read is that the demonstration took place in a courtyard behind the Hemenway gymnasium at Harvard University in the summer of 1901. A quick look at a current Harvard campus map revealed the good news: there is still a building called the Hemenway Gymnasium in the north yard of the Harvard campus. A quick click on the "details" tab of the map revealed the bad news: it was built in 1940.

Filling in a minor detail

In the absence of any living witnesses to Constance Applebee's introduction of field hockey to the United States in 1901, I find myself compulsively searching for as many contemporary accounts as I can possibly find. Sometimes I'm looking for specific facts, but other times I'm just blindly fishing in the hope that I'll come across something I didn't know before.

Stanford, 1902-1903

As my research on the early days of college field hockey in the United States continued, I was surprised to learn that the sport was played in the western part of the country much earlier than I had previously thought. I inadvertently stumbled across evidence that the sport was played by women at the San Diego Normal School (now known as San Diego State University) as early as 1903, which inspired me to research the state of California in more detail. I eventually learned that women at Stanford took up field hockey around the same time, although in neither case have I been able to trace the origin of exposure to the sport.

Bryn Mawr College, 1901-1902

When Constance Applebee introduced field hockey to Bryn Mawr College in 1901, the school did not yet have its own newspaper. The College News, with Applebee as its faculty editor, would not begin publishing until 1914. Two campus literary magazines, The Fortnightly Philistine and The Lantern, were in existence at that time, though, and they documented the arrival of the new sport.