Norwich bulletin., 1918-08-15

area. Those camps having them are going to be long remembered by the soldier who does his training there. few miles so the job is to get busy Most of them have water within a and either find or make a big swim ming hole.
 With a big swimming pool, one large eenough to take care of four or five hundred at a crack the army athletic director is bound to give his men a pile of sport. Nothing will ap- i peal more to the boys than a dip in the pond and nothing, during hot | weather is better for them Of course, where there are so many all | sorts of safeguards are necessary so l that no one comes to grief by getting
 in over his head when he can't swim.
 All of which means extra detail.
 The army athletic job is a big one.
 As I said it is going to teach the man 1 holding it more than he gives. No physical director alive is able to know
 moree than a quarter of the sports he
 is goin gto handle. Strange as it may
 seem, the average camp physical di-
 rector, or athletic director, if you so
 wish to term him, is more of an org
 anizer and manager than a coach. He
 will have more irons in the fire than | he can handle himself His job is to get the right man to run each of the irons.
 Two or threee men running athletics in one cantonment can keep busy six
 teen hours a day and not clea up the
 job if they want to do tn big hing for
 h boys. Detail and detail comes with
 each new venture There is no end of
 it, Take a camp of twenty to thirty thousand men and the mere organi- l ZatjnT nf Q ic 2 mans ci7n6 inh
 Add to that the detail and you have the work for a dozen men. Add to
 that the getting and handling of ath-
 letic equipment for the whole camp
 and you need bank president to keep
 the books straight. Tn successful man
 at the job has to know about every
 thing or he has rude fall.
 There is a great deal of talk about
 standardizing sport in the service.
 I've read a lot of stuff along these
 lines Take it from me, if it is done
 the result isn't going to be for the
 best. Too many matters enter into
 consideration. What one athletic di-
 rector finds possible in one camp is
 not always the thing for the next one.
 Different conditions, different climates, sites officers and men have to be dealt with and to my way of think ing, no one set of sport is possible for
 all soldiers. It simply cannot be done. Then there is the law of the ) camp. It differs, to some extent, and no program which applies to one is any to likely to fit the others.
 At one camp they go in strong for ush ball Think it ideal as it get a company pitted against another com- pany. At another camp someone in authority believed the game too rough So pushbau didn't go there. Then there is the commanding officer. He
 may have a hunch that baseball or quoits are just the thing. As re- suit, the fellows who want to take a fling in track are under a handicap But the ranking officers are the best sort of sportsmen, they know what sport may do for an army and they boost it.
 This same thing applies all the way down. I know of one camp where . , school was held for teaching various games where no equipment was nec- essary. The result was most complex Some companies went in strong for ons : kind of games, others for another anc
 still a third couldn't see anything ir any of them. Foolishness and poppy. l cock, they seemed to think them ye ' a company in an adjoining barrack: was laying the time of it's life witt l some of these games All of whicE 7 was due to the individual tastes of tn, 3 various athletic officers in these-y -yari