How did high school sports originate?

Question

How did high school sports originate?

Answer 1

It was the result of a religious movement and a boys' book that is still in the libraries....

School sports originated in England in an organized way in the 1840's. Dr. Thomas Arnold, DD, a minister and headmaster of Rugby,  a boy's school, believed that "games" (sports) were essential in molding the character of young men. He insisted that all his boys participate in games. This was part of a movement called muscular Christianity.

Violent sports were not discouraged and by the end of term there were always a number of students limping home. But it caught on, and soon American schools were imitating the British. First the private schools, which have never been backward in blooding their students with games like rugby and lacrosse, and the the public hogh schools, where the sports were toned down somewhat. So by the turn of the (19th( Century every high school had its baseball and football teams, and track and field meets.  This allowed even the most remotve and poorest communities to root for local teams, even though the big national teams might never come through town.

The rise of school athletics coincided with and was made possible by the reversal of the cultural antipathy towards sports shared by Calvinists and conservative evangelicals.

The muscular Christianity movement, which began in English private schools, rejected St. Paul's elevation of spirit over body and advanced pysical exercise as a complementary component of spiritual development.  The theologically liberal proponents of muscular Christianity rejected religious conservatives' belives that sports were "develish pastimes" that encouraged idleness and glorified the inherently corrupt and singful body.

Thomas Hughe's 1857 novel "Tom Brown's School Days" -- a still readable book -- extolled the salutary moral of competitive sports on the students of Dr. Arnold's Rugby School and strongle influenced the Amrican elite to view sports as a means of enhancing the spiritual and moral development of young men.

An interesting part of US history:

The author of "Tom Brown's Schooldays," Thomas Hughes, wound up in America, where he founded a "kibbutz," a social settlement or Utopia for the young sons of English aristocrats who were not able to inherit property, due to English custom.  Today, Rugby, Tennessee, is a small village in Morgan and Scott counties. (See the website below for info on this little known place)