Sports Before the Big Green
Today, Dartmouth College has a comprehensive Athletic program that includes programs for student and community wellness.
The Athletics department says “Dartmouth is a mecca for the highly motivated student-athlete…offering 35 varsity sports – 16 for men, 18 for women and coed sailing. In addition, there are 35 club and 24 intramural sports as three-quarters of Dartmouth undergraduates participate in some form of athletics.”
There are facilities to accommodate diverse interests and crowds – ranging from a 14,000 square foot gym, ski slope and hiking trails to indoor/outdoor facilities for tennis, track and field sports as well as stadiums for football (capacity:11,000), hockey (seated capacity 3,500), basketball (capacity 2,100).
Students participating in Varsity Sports play at the Division I level and compete as part of the Ivy League, a group of eight peer institutions created in 1954. Within the Ivy League and on-campus, Dartmouth is referred to as the “Big Green.”
Then – Go Tigers?
In the 1820s, there were no official teams. In some sense, there wasn’t even “Dartmouth Green.” According to Dartmouth Sports, “The first Dartmouth College intercollegiate athletic contest, a baseball game, was played in 1866. At that time, green was adopted by the students as the college color.” By 1879, students put together a college yell – which today sounds more like a mash-up for UVA and Princeton:
Despite the lack of official competitions or even a college color, students in the 1820s did play football.
In the same 1893 History of Dartmouth Athletics that captures the TIGER chant, I learn that the first football field was on what we now know as the “College Green.”
The Common, or “College Green,” – its correct official name, – was, in the original plan of the village (Hanover), devoted by the college to students’ diversions in connection with other public uses, and the games of ball there indulged are duly recognized by the ancient records of the town in legalized derogation of ordinary police regulations. The Common was first fenced in 1836, thus discontinuing the highway that, till then, diagonally traversed it.
The distinctive Dartmouth game was … from time immemorial, the grand old game of foot-ball, not the modern exclusive and violent Rugby, but the free, joyous and exhilarating pursuit of the ball all over the Green by every student, according to the measure of his inclination and powers. The traditional division of parties or “sides” made everyone an active member. The first, or “Old Division,” pitted the seniors and sophomores against the juniors and freshmen. The two great literary societies, “Socials” and “Fraters,” furnished another obvious division; and both these arrangements of parties brought out often earnest and persistent, but generally good-natured, rivalry.
I have a brief passing mention of Dartmouth football from this era – courtesy of a term paper my grandmother Mary Bryan wrote as a college student in the 1930s. In a paper on her great uncle’s experience at Dartmouth, Mary shares a passage from a letter he saved from a fellow alum, Joseph Bartlett Eastman,
“There seems to have been something of a contest at Hanover between the Quacks and the Juniors but I imagine it will turn out to be much squeal and little wool as the devil said when he shaved the pigs.”
Sources Cited:
- Bartlett, John H, and John P. Gifford. Dartmouth Athletics: A Complete History of All Kinds of Sports at the College. Concord, N.H: Republican Press Association, 1893. Print.
- Joseph B. Eastman, letter from November 6, 1825 as shared in Bryan, Mary Morrill Leadbeater, et al. The Farm: A Compilation of the Research and Memories of Mary Odell Morrill Leadbeater and Mary Morrill Leadbeater Bryan. Martha S. Bryan (Self-Published), 1998.