Tennessee Military Institute - Radiogram Yearbook (Sweetwater, TN)

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..,a, A.. . rf It is not surprising that boys grow strong and robust when such exercises are part of every day's prog ram. Page Sixty-Seven

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ATHLETICS Tennessee Military Institute encourages all forms of outdoor and indoor athletics. The policies of the school with respect to athletics have been changed very little in the last eighteen years and such changes as have been made have been in the line of the addition of the so-called minor sports and provision for interscholastic contests in these sports. This makes clear that we are rather well satisfied with the results of our athletic policies. In Tennessee Military Institute, we do not have compulsory athletics. This statement may surprise and disappoint some readers of this page. We make no criticism of schools that do have compulsory athletics, but we prefer the results of playing for the fun of playing, and so long as we continue to be able to interest so high a per cent of our boys in playing for the love of it, we are not likely to resort to the method of compulsion. There are good reasons for the large number of our boys who take part in various sports during their free time. First of these is that we have so many different lines of sport and groups representing so many different levels of ability in different sports. It becomes easy for a boy to iind the group in which he can compete on fairly even terms. A second reason for voluntary boy-interest in sports in T. M. I. is the voluntary teacher-interest in various sports. Even the older teachers of our faculty continue to enjoy golf and tennis and practically all the rest keep up their interest and participate in the coaching of teams in major and minor sports. Probably the most important reason of all for voluntary boy-interest in sports is that the school offers no athletic scholarships and does not even seek to enroll the well-developed athletes of other schools, either public or private. More than ninety per cent of the boys making places for themselves on our interscholastic teams have never made a varsity team in any other school be- fore entering Tennessee Military Institute. These facts are well known in our school. Consequently boys feel that they have good chances of developing athletic ability and winning their places on the various teams. In addition to varsity schedules, provisions are made for interscholastic contests in major sports for three or four other age-and-size groups. In addition to our major sports-football, basketball, and track, with sev- eral teams in football and basketball-during 1936-37, we had teams and in- terscholastic contests in fencing, tennis, golf, and swimming. Boxing is being resumed next year. The school has facilities for all these sports, including a nine-hole golf course, which occupies about seventy acres of the 100-acre campus. A new gymnasium is being constructed during the summer of 1937, and will be ready for use at the opening of school in September. Page Sixty-Nine