A false start
Posted on September 10, 2012 12:11 am
Soccer got going pretty quickly in American colleges after the standardization of the rules in England in 1863, but that turned out to be something of a false start.
The very first steps took place farther west than one might expect, in Waukesha, Wisc., on Oct. 11, 1866, when a team of Carroll College students beat a team of Waukesha townies, 5-2. That game holds the honor of being the first game in the United States under the 1863 London association football rules, but only by a narrow margin. The second game took place just nine days later, in Hartford, Conn., when a team of Trinity College freshmen played a 1-1 tie with a team of Trinity College sophomores.
A lot of the earliest soccer games in American colleges were of that intramural sort, with freshman vs. sophomores being the most popular division. Before 1870, frosh-vs.-sophs games had taken place at Trinity, Brown, Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey), Wesleyan, Columbia and Rutgers.
The first college where a lasting team was formed, rather than one that was just organized for the day or for the game, was Princeton, which played its first game in November 1867 (the exact date is lost) against the Princeton Theological Seminary. The college team won, 5-2. After that beginning, Princeton played at least one game in each of the next nine years. One of those was the game against Rutgers on Nov. 6, 1869 that has long been incorrectly referred to as the first game of American football. But while it was really association football that was being played, it wasn’t Princeton’s first soccer game, just the first intercollegiate one (Princeton’s opponent in both of its previous games, the Princeton Theological Seminary, wasn’t a college).
By the early 1870s, a few college teams were playing each other fairly frequently. At first, it was just Princeton, Rutgers and Columbia. In 1872, Yale and Stevens Tech joined the group. In 1873, additions were the City College of New York and New York University. There also were games to the west involving Cornell and the University of Michigan, and games to the south involving Washington & Lee, VMI and the University of Virginia. The freshmen vs. sophomores craze also was spreading, to schools that included Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse, Williams, Bowdoin, Worcester Poly, the University of Vermont and the University of California.
Harvard, in the meanwhile, was remaining aloof from all this, as were other Boston-area colleges. Many of the Harvard players had come up through what was called the Boston Rules Game, which had been developed in the early 1860s by the Oneida FC team of Boston prep-school boys and which was much more like rugby than like association football.
In 1874 and 1875, Harvard’s Boston Rules team played a series of rugby games against Canadian teams, particularly from McGill University in Montreal, that caused the Harvard players to decide that rugby was the way to go. In 1876, they convinced teams from the mid-Atlantic states who had been playing association football to give up that game and join them on the rugby field. Within a year, all of the main college soccer teams in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut had abandoned that sport in favor of rugby. And that is why I say that the American college soccer of the 1860s and 1870s amounts to a false start.
It was another 30 years before college soccer began to regain its feet, but in the 1880s, the sport grew rapidly among immigrant groups in factory towns and cities like Fall River, Mass.; Kearny, N.J.; Pawtucket, R.I.; St. Louis, Philadelphia and Chicago. While the colleges were altering the rules of rugby to create American football, those immigrant communities were playing soccer the same way Europeans did. So that change of direction in 1876, while damaging to American soccer in the short run, was not a bad thing in the long run, and that growth in the 1880s among immigrants and factory workers is what I consider the real, lasting start of American soccer.
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This is another post about 19th-century American soccer that relies heavily on research done by Mel Smith of Asheville, N.C. (who doesn’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions I’ve drawn from it)
Nice bit of info there Roger and much appreciated. I just collated ASL1 and ASL2 data from various sites and immediately recognized the Fall River.
Does Mel Smith have a website where his research is available? I ask because one source lists all incarnations of teams that moved, suspended operations, merged or disbanded while another lists franchises by the names used in their final years of existence.
For instance, one website says Philadelphia Field Club became Bethlehem Steel before the 1922-23 season while a second Philadelphia Field Club came on the scene for the second season. Another site shows only one Philadelphia FC franchise.
Any help would be appreciated.
Mel Smith does not have a website, but his research would not shed light on the subject you are interested in anyway. Mel’s research is entirely about 19th-century America games in various football codes (soccer, rugby and American football).
By far the leading researcher on the ASL1 is Colin Jose, who wrote a detailed book on that league in 1998. A few others of us have written some about that league, but Colin’s research is the mother lode on the ASL1. Colin has a website, but it is about Canadian soccer. I think that the ASL1 standings on David Litterer’s American Soccer History Archives website are the ones that Colin dug up.
Concerning Philadelphia and Bethlehem: When the ASL was announced in the spring of 1921, it included both a Philadelphia FC team and the Bethlehem Steel team. However, the Philadelphia franchise was an empty shell, without players, and before the start of the first season in September 1921, the Bethlehem team was moved into that shell (largely because Bethlehem Steel, despite winning a boatload of championships between 1915 and 1921, had always drawn poorly at home). The Bethlehem team played as Philadelphia FC in the 1921-22 ASL season, but before the 1922-23 season, it was moved back to Bethlehem and a new Philadelphia FC team was put together.
Thank you for clearing that up.
You might want to check out this site: http://bethlehemsteelsoccer.org/ if you’re interested in Bethlehem Steel / Philadelphia FC.
It’s probably the most detailed resource for a single pre-modern US soccer team – it has transcriptions of newspaper articles spanning the length of Bethlehem Steel’s active years.
Fascinating article, but also a bit frustrating in that it presents yet another variation on the story of the origin of American football. In this version, the Harvard students come back from playing rugby at McGill and decide to play rugby.
In another version, the Harvard players taught the McGill players how to play their game, the McGill players taught the Harvard players how to play rugby, and they played both styles. After the game, the McGill group incorporated some of Harvard’s ideas into their version of rugby (which would evolve at a glacial pace into what we now call Canadian football), and the Harvard group incorporated rugby ideas into their game, creating the first version of American football.
And there’s still more variations, depending on which book you read.
By “Stevens Tech” did you mean Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ? Pretty interesting note and information you were able to dig up.
Yes, the same one. Between 1872 and 1876, it played 19 games against Columbia, NYU, CCNY, New Jersey AA, Rutgers, Yale and Princeton. It’s home games seem to have been at Elysian Field and St. George’s Cricket Ground, both in Hoboken.
I can’t claim to have dug this up myself. Mel Smith did.
You mean the “S.H.I.T – Stevens Hoboken Institute of Technology”? I want a T-shirt.
I agree that my reference to the Harvard-McGill games was an oversimplification, but my concern is with what happened in the United States after those games, not with what happened in Canada. And I intentionally left out some details in the account of the changeover from association football to rugby, such as the fact that observers from Princeton at a Harvard-Yale rugby-like game in New Haven on Nov. 11, 1875 took glowing accounts back to New Jersey and speeded the changeover.
But those details don’t change the fact that 1876 was a huge turning point in the history of soccer in America, when the game began to switch from the colleges to the factory towns (just a few years after it had begun its switch from the upper classes to the working classes in Britain).
As for this being a new angle on the early development of American football, that the game evolved from American colleges tinkering with the rules of rugby in the late 1870s, I don’t think it’s all that new. I have read it in books published as much as 36 years ago.
I have a son at Carroll (now University), which has been affiliated with Presbyterian Church since shortly after its founding. I’ve never seen this reference before though. Interesting.
I disagree with the assertion that the first intercollegiate game November 6, 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton was not football. Although it was very different from the game we call American Football today, the players did indeed carry the ball in their hands. The forward pass had not yet been invented, but the game is reported to have been an unusual hybrid of the sports we currently call soccer and rugby.
A good link:
http://www.scarletknights.com/football/history/first-game.asp
Despite being from the Rutgers website, the article you link to refers to the two teams (the two captains actually) agreeing “that the rules be adopted from those of the London Football Association.” Soccer rules? This squares with several other accounts of this game that I have read, but if they were playing American Football, why did they use soccer rules? And why does the account of the game include several descriptions of goals being scored by someone kicking the ball between the posts, and none that I can find of anyone carrying the ball?
It does sound very different from the game we call American Football today, but not much different from the game they called association football back then.
I really am convinced that it was soccer being played (even though the name soccer wasn’t coined until the 1880s).
“Adopted from” does not mean “identical to.”
http://static.nfl.com/static/content/public/image/history/pdfs/History/Chronology_2011.pdf
The NFL website above uses the term “modified London Football Association rules.” I suspect the format was probably more similar to the Sheffield Rules which existed before the historic London Rules of 1863.
Regardless of who is correct here (and I must admit that precedent favors you, in light of all the learned commentary I’ve come to appreciate form you over the years), I very much appreciate this very informative article. As a proud Rutgers alumnus, I thank you for researching and compiling it!
The linked article says nothing about anyone carrying the ball.
In fact, this part “The ball could be advanced only by kicking or batting it with the feet, hands, heads or sides” seems to indicate that while you could punch the ball with your hands, you wouldn’t have been permitted to carry the ball.
Which, by the way, was part of the orthodox (London) FA soccer rule book at the time.
My conspiracy theory was that Rutgers-Princeton may have been put forward as the first game in order to minimize the Canadian role. Be that as it may or may not, the period of 1875/1876 strikes one as pivotal in the ‘why football, why not soccer’ conversation, in a way that 1869 doesn’t. From what I’d heard, ‘American-ness’ was was a crucial factor arguing for the game, if not in 1875, then at least by 10 or 15 years later in Walter Camp’s heyday.
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