Baseball
The oldest reference in the archives to athletics at Ashland comes from the first volume of the
Randolph-Macon Monthly for December 1878. There we find the Bandy is now the great game. Every evening the play ground [
sic] is crowded. Well contested and exciting are the games. Would the Richmond boys, who are so emulous of fame, like to try a game of bandy? The
Oxford English Dictionary suggests bandy was a game something like hockey. We have no hint of what sports existed before the magazine came into existence. One of them was probably baseball.
The same publication announced three months later that Base-Ball is all the rage. Two clubs had elected officers-ln-dependent and Ashland, all of whom were students. It is not altogether certain that these were, strictly speaking, school teams. In April 1880, the magazine reported there have been already two or three hotly contested games between our rival clubs, the Ashland and the Independent. The college is mostly on the Ashland side, but the town is in general vociferous for the Independents. Baseball continued in the fall term, as a kind of minor league for the organized teams. Many of the 'Fish' show base-ball propensities and play with a vim and liveliness that argues [augurs?] well for the future. Something novel is introduced. We intend to have no outsiders on our nine this year, it is to be strictly a college matter, and we shall make an agreement with the Richmond college nine that the contest shall be simply college against college, and not Richmond college and Richmond against Randolph Macon and Ashland.
Playing outside men, perhaps townies, perhaps semipros, continued through the 1890s. The faculty condemned the practice in 1897 ''as being against the principles of college atheletics [sic] and against the law of morality and forbade from further play students who went on the team to match games in Lexington and Farmville. In 1899, the faculty refused the team permission to allow an outside man.
The first official cognizance of the sport came in 1893, when the faculty gave permission to the baseball team to play two games in Richmond in May-one of which was with Vanderbilt University. In 1894, the faculty permitted the teams two games anywhere in Virginia, but the students could not go to watch unless it was in Richmond. In 1895, three games away from Ashland were allowed, and by 1896, there was an away schedule of five games against Richmond College, Hampden-Sydney, Virginia Military Institute, and its next-door neighbor, Washington and Lee, as well as against the Randolph-Macon Academy. Beginning in 1894, the student publication carried rather complete reports on the games, giving paragraph-long descriptions of games and tables of scores for individual players.
Previous | Contents | Next
Reprinted from Professor James Scanlon's Randolph-Macon College: A Southern History 1825-1967