Baseball and football pioneer high school sports -- The rise of schoolboy track and tennis -- The physical education movement and the campaign for control -- Educators impose institutional control -- Student resistance to control and reform -- Winter indoor sports fill the void -- New outdoor sports advance the educational mission -- The new athletic girl and interscholastic sports -- Interscholastics and the golden age of sports -- Creation of military sports in the secondary schools -- The private and Catholic schools' parallel world of interscholastic sports - Girls' interscholastic sports and the exuberance to compete -- The separate and unequal world of African American interscholastic sports -- New national governance and the triumph of the state high school associations
Summary:
"Nearly half of all American high school students participate in sports teams. With a total of 7.6 million participants as of 2008, this makes the high school sports program in America the largest organized sports program in the world. Pruter's work traces the history of high school sports from the student-led athletic clubs of the 1800s through to the establishment of educator control of high school sports under a national federation by the 1930s. Pruter's research serves not only to highlight this rich history but also to provide new perspectives on how high school sports became the arena by which Americans fought for some of the most contentious issues in society, such as race, immigration and Americanization, gender roles, religious conflict, the role of the military in democracy, and the commercial exploitation of our youth." Publisher's website.
