STL All Sports

It is not definitely established when football under soccer rules was imported into the United States. A form of association football, with ill-defined rules and no set number of players, was among the pastimes of townspeople and schoolboys in the Eastern United States until colonial days. Herbert Manchester, in his book, "Four Centuries of Sport in America," disclosed that some species of football was played at both Harvard and Yale as far back as the 1820's, but it was more a means to "haze" freshmen than regulation play. It appears that the newcomers at each school were forced into what might be called a football game by the sophomores. The "freshies" were supposed to kick the ball. The sophs made a habit of missing their kicks at the ball and kicked the newcomers instead. The agitated "freshies" soon were kicking back, and this brought about a lot of "class-day" injuries.

The authorities at both schools took cognizance of this and in the 1830's forbade such "games." Football then lapsed, so far as the records are concerned, until after the Civil War, and in 1869 Princeton and Rutgers met in the first intercollegiate game at New Brunswick, N.J., as mentioned previously.

But it was, meanwhile, known as a sport and was played in the United States between the 1830's and 1869. Henry Chadwick, called the "Father of American Baseball," wrote a booklet in 1866 for the "Dime Library," published by Beadle and Co. of New York, in which he outlined rules for play at football, as well as cricket. Chadwick touched not only on soccer, but also on rugby; but no heed was paid to rugby by the colleges, the soccer game being preferred.