{"product_id":"2940015775693","title":"College Girl Athletics: Vassar, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Smith","description":"Nook version of vintage monograph originally published in 1903.  Contains lots of great info and illustrations seldom seen in the last 110 years. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRead excerpt -\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA pink V on a Vassar girl's sweater means that she has broken a record. Symbol of ability, key to many of the good things of life, the athletic freshman longs for this letter with all her soul. She works for it by day and thinks of it by night. At last the dream of her sub-freshman days comes true. On field-day she makes her debut. She stands for one dreadful moment, with the emerald of the Circle, the waving flags and streamers, the hundreds of figures, blurring into one mass of color before her frightened eyes; then she shakes off the weakness and faces the ordeal with tightened lips and paler cheeks. She takes the hurdles one by one. With brain of fire, throat of parchment, feet of lead, she makes a last spurt into the arms of her friends beyond the tape, and breaks the record. The freshmen let loose pandemonium. The class-cheer bursts forth, and the winner's name rings out at the end. But in the moment of her triumph, with the excitement and enthusiasm surging about her, her first exultant thought is not, \"I've won my V,\" but, \"I've helped my class.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn ambition wider than one's ego—that is what a college contest helps to teach its girl participants. It is a charge as old as Plato that a woman is inclined to look at the universe in terms of herself, to bound her horizon by a personal point of view. If athletics, then, can teach a girl to work for her class first and herself afterward, it is not a small achievement.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis development of class loyalty is one of the incidental blessings, also, of the great basket-ball game at Smith between sophomores and freshmen, which, like field-day at Vassar, is the characteristic athletic event of the college. The game takes place on a Saturday afternoon in the gymnasium, just before the spring vacation. The result of months of work is staked on a single throw, and the climax is fittingly dramatic. No girl appears without her colors, and the gymnasium galleries blossom like a garden with flags, ribbons, flowers, and sashes. Even silk curtains are appropriated with the eagerness of class zeal, and the class animals in various guises give humorous touches to the decorations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe freshmen and their junior friends are on one side, the sophomores and seniors on the other. Original songs, appropriate and eulogistic, set to familiar tunes, are sung first by one half, then by the other, in a merrily taunting antiphonal. Even the cross-beams are fringed with eager spectators. There is not an inch anywhere except down-stairs on the platform, where the faculty sit, the president in the middle, adorned impartially with a huge rosette of each contestant's color. Then the teams file in, with the most original thing they have been able to find in the line of mascots. The whistle blows and the game begins. Very often the sophomores, by virtue of their better endurance from the extra year's practice, are the victors; but the contest is close and the issue by no means certain. As the second half rounds to a triumphant finish, the excitement is at fever-heat, and breaks into jubilant songs at the end. With a mighty rush from the gallery, eager classmates lift the winning captain to their shoulders, and not until after the supper for both teams that night does the enthusiasm cool to sober joy.","brand":"history-bytes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47156164362480,"sku":"2940015775693","price":5.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940015775693_p0.jpg?v=1763624199","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940015775693","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}