by John E. Sharp
For nearly 50 years, Hesston academy and college athletics were confined to intramural games—basketball, baseball, tennis—by school policy. In the 1920s, intramural skirmishes were sometimes open to the public.
In the first public event of the second term of the 1921-22 academic year, the senior academy men, sure that they were invincible, challenged the entire campus to a game of basketball. The opposition could create an all-school team of any combination. But before they could prove their case, the game was rained out, literally. The student-financed and student-built gym could not handle the “veritable downpour” of rain. Puddles on the floor from the leaking roof became “larger and more numerous” as the game progressed, until finally the game was called with the all-school team in the lead 23-12.
As dean, J.D. Charles helped to shape a philosophy of athletics that limited sports to intramural games. A series of the dean’s lectures led to a position statement adopted by the student athletic association. The association declared itself “aggressively opposed” to intercollegiate sports because they were “detrimental” to the educational goals, the intellectual standards of scholarship, and the moral standards of institutions and students.
Educational goals of schools and students are compromised, they said, when a few skilled players are “overtrained” at the expense of the majority who need physical exercise. Granting special privileges to star athletes reduces the intellectual standards of scholarship, impairs an athlete’s “power of concentration” and distorts the “relative values in life.” An intercollegiate athletic program is also “unquestionably detrimental” to a school’s moral standards because it fosters a “win-at-any-cost” mentality, including the “evils of unfair play, rivalry, a form of gambling, and kindred evils.” For all these reasons, the athletic association pledged to oppose the pressures of acculturation and cooperate with the administration to maintain a full intramural athletic program.
The first intercollegiate varsity sport, men’s basketball, came in 1955-56 when Ray Kauffman was interim athletic director. With President Roy Roth’s support, Kauffman and coach “Mean” Gene Miller proposed varsity basketball to the faculty. Evan Oswald, athletic director on sabbatical that year, supported the move. After several meetings, some of them heated, the faculty acquiesced, and President Roth took the proposal to the Mennonite Board of Education. Nelson Kauffman, MEA board chair, at first adamantly opposed the proposal, then finally consented. With board endorsement, Hesston’s first varsity basketball team, which included our own Marion Bontrager, challenged Tabor College’s B squad—and lost 61-52.
The game is believed to have been played Friday, January 27, 1956.
—Hesston College historian John E. Sharp ’73 is writing a centennial history about the college, founded in 1909. Sharp is also a history professor at the college.