Baseball and Club Sports, 1910

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The first club sport at East Carolina – baseball – was organized in the spring of the school’s f’irst academic year, 1909-1910. Unlike intramurals which involve athletic competition between teams formed within a school, and intercollegiate play featuring contests between schools typically organized into athletic leagues, club sports more characteristically emerge within one school based on the interests and abilities of the school’s students and then compete with other teams, though not necessarily collegiate teams, and often on an ad hoc basis without the benefit of league scheduling and promotion. Most importantly, perhaps, participation in club sports is not funded by athletic scholarships, but instead relies largely on the determination of students to organize and compete against other similar teams. Today at ECU, club sports range from boxing and baseball to rugby and yoga. While club sports are more diverse and multifaceted than ever before in ECU’s history, they trace back to, significantly enough, a short-lived team that apparently reflected the passion of a small but sufficient group of men on campus determined to participate in what was, by the early twentieth century, an increasingly popular sport in eastern North Carolina.

Documents related to the ECTTS baseball team come from the First Annual Catalogue of the East Carolina Teachers' Training School, 1909-1910, and newspaper accounts, published in either the Daily Reflector or the weekly edition of the same publication, the Eastern Reflector. The first ECTTS catalogue, published in 1910, noted under the heading, “Athletic Association,” that “the young men organized a baseball club and played several games during the year, making for the school a very satisfactory record.” The officers of the Athletic Association, J. L. Rawles, manager, and E. D. Dodd, captain, were listed but their connection to the baseball team itself was not clarified.

No mention of the “baseball club” appeared, however, in the Second Annual Catalogue, published in 1911. The catalogue’s entry on “Athletic Clubs” did note that “during the past year tennis and basketball clubs were organized among the students, and although no games were played with outside institutions yet much good was derived through the friendly contests that were held on the campus.” Under “Athletics,” the Second Annual Catalogue bragged that students were “provided with a basketball ground and four tennis courts. They are encouraged to take a sufficient amount of outdoor exercise to insure good health. For this purpose, walks have been laid off in the park and each student is requested to spend at least one hour a day in the open air.” In later catalogues of the Training School era, baseball is not mentioned again. The baseball club was, then, apparently a phenomenon of the spring of 1910.

The first game was played on Monday, March 28, 1910, against a team identified simply as “the Greenville boys,” presumably referring to the local high school team based at the Greenville Graded School on Evans Street. The Daily Reflector described the game as “a fast and interesting game of baseball, made sensational by long hits and ‘grandstand’ plays.” The Monday afternoon game was played on the Training School field and “auspiciously opened” the ECTTS baseball season with a 6-2 victory. The Reflector admitted that “there were many errors made on both sides, yet the playing was at times brilliant.” Also noted was that “the young ladies of the school were out in full force, and their effective cheering materially aided in winning the victory for the purple and gold.” The Reflector added, “the town rooters did good work, but in comparison with the mighty yells that came from ‘cross the way’ they sounded but as a gentle wind in the face of a raging storm.”

Highlights of the opening game included a “one-handed stop of a hot grounder” by a student identified simply as “Lipscomb,” and “the pitching of Holiday.” The latter reportedly “had the town boys at his mercy throughout the game and fourteen times did the Greenville sluggers fail to connect with his benders.” In the first inning alone, ECTTS scored three runs, followed by another two in the second inning, making the game 5-0 going into the fourth when the Greenville boys scored their first run. ECTTS scored again in the seventh, and Greenville scored once more in the top of the ninth but ended up well short going down in defeat, 6-2. Dr. Elbert Alfred “Burt” Moye, one of the town’s most prominent and well-educated physicians who resided across Evans Street from the Greenville Graded School, single-handedly umpired the game.

The second game, a Saturday afternoon contest against Winterville High School, was also played on the Training School grounds. Admission was 15 cents. Unlike the first “fast” game, the second was a “slow, one-sided” match with the Training School downing Winterville High, 19-4. In the first inning, ECTTS scored nine runs on nine hits, “pounding the ball all over the field.” Seven more runs came in the second inning, giving the Training School squad “a lead which was impossible to be overcome.” Yet somehow, the Reflector found the game “as a whole … listless and devoid of any features, except the cheering of the fair rooters of the E.C.T.T.S. which was of the ‘big league’ variety.” Once again, Holiday pitched, this time striking out 11 batters and allowing only four hits. The Reflector added, in conclusion, that “the conduct of the Winterville boys … was exceptionally good. We did not even see one of them smoke a cigarette or hear them use a word of profanity. Wish we could say it for all school teams.”

Whether or not ECTTS baseball games elicited conduct unbecoming a campus with a largely female student body is open to question, but one thing is certain: with the third game, played April 9 at the Training School, local press coverage all but disappeared. The Saturday afternoon contest began at 3:45, and once again admission was 15 cents. This time, however, the Daily Reflector headline, near the bottom of the frontpage, simply read, “Training School Wins Again.” The article consisted of one line: “The Training School boys added another victory to their ball list, Saturday, when they defeated Washington High School in a score of 9 to 3.”

The team soon vanished from ECTTS history. No further reporting on it is to be found in the local press. It would be easy enough to attribute its disappearance to declining male enrollment at ECTTS after the school’s opening year. Also noteworthy, however, was the organization of a more aggressive “Greenville club” that sought to compete weekly with teams in the area bringing baseball games to the town regularly. ECTTS administrators, perhaps concerned that athletic competition might compromise the educational mission of the school, did not pursue a more rigorous involvement in the sport. The star players from year one, “Holiday” and “Lipscomb,” are not listed in tallies of the student body, and even their first names seem lost to history. As the Reflector hinted, baseball games perhaps occasioned undesirable forms of behavior on campus, including cigarette smoking and cursing, that the Training School would not tolerate. One thing is clear: after 1910, ECTTS athletics, though still based on clubs, was limited to basketball, tennis, and hiking, and competition was intramural. In the mix, the ECTTS student body, nearly all female by the school’s third year, came to dominate the scene in healthy, well-mannered ways.

Sources

Citation Information

Title: Baseball and Club Sports, 1910

Author: John A. Tucker, PhD

Date of Publication: 11/10/2020

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