Unit 14 · What PE Flattens

Per Henrik Ling was born in Sweden in 1776. He worked as a fencing master at Lund University in the early 1800s. In 1813 he founded the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm. The Swedish state paid for it and trained teachers there. Its graduates taught in schools and army units across Sweden.

Ling divided his gymnastics into four branches: educational, military, medical and aesthetic. Military gymnastics included fencing with swords and training with bayonets. Fencing was no longer a separate art with its own masters. It became one branch of a national program for soldiers and students.

Ling died in 1839, and his students carried the system abroad. In 1889 the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics opened to train American women as teachers of the Swedish system. A normal school is a college that trains teachers. Swedish gymnastics then spread into many American public schools.

In 1811 Friedrich Ludwig Jahn opened an outdoor exercise ground at the Hasenheide in Berlin. It was called a Turnplatz, a place for Turnen, the German word for gymnastics. Jahn linked exercise to German national feeling after Napoleon’s armies had defeated Prussia. Prussia banned Turnen in 1820 because rulers feared its politics, and the ban lasted until 1842.

The revolutions of 1848 in the German states failed. Many who took part fled to the United States, and Americans called them Forty-Eighters. They founded Turner clubs, called a Turnverein. The first in the United States opened in Cincinnati in 1848, and the Chicago Turngemeinde followed in 1852.

A Turner hall held gymnastics, fencing, singing, lectures and a library. Turners in Midwestern cities, including Chicago, pressed school boards to add gymnastics to public schools. They also trained many of the first gym teachers. Their clubs treated exercise as one part of a free citizen’s education.

In 1879 Dudley Allen Sargent became director of the new Hemenway Gymnasium at Harvard College. He measured each student’s height, weight and strength when they arrived. Then he wrote a personal exercise plan for each one. Measuring the body in this way is called anthropometry.

Sargent designed his own exercise machines with weights and pulleys, and other colleges copied them. His records turned exercise into something a college could chart, grade and compare. That idea of a graded school subject shaped physical education for the next century.

In 1885 William G. Anderson gathered teachers in Brooklyn to found the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education. The group grew into today’s SHAPE America. A national association could write standards, hold meetings and publish journals. Fencing and wrestling in schools would now be judged by those standards, not by the old masters of each art.

The United States entered World War I in April 1917. The Army had to train hundreds of thousands of new soldiers in months. The War Department formed the Commission on Training Camp Activities that same year. Raymond Fosdick led it. Congress passed a draft law, the Selective Service Act, in May 1917.

The commission ran sports, games and entertainment in the camps. Boxing got special attention because officers believed it built fitness and courage. Boxing coaches, including some professional fighters, taught large groups of recruits at the same time. Camp newspapers reported bouts between units.

Army boxing looked very different from a boxing club. A club let a boxer learn under one trainer for years. A camp gave thousands of men a short course before they shipped to France. After the war, many of those men came home as boxing fans, and the sport grew in American cities in the 1920s.

The American Expeditionary Forces, or AEF, were the U.S. troops sent to Europe in World War I. After the fighting ended in November 1918, many soldiers waited months in France to go home. The Army held sports tournaments to keep them busy. Boxing was one of the largest.

Gene Tunney was a young Marine from New York. In 1919 he won the light heavyweight championship of the AEF in Paris. The title made his name known to soldiers and sportswriters. He turned his wartime fame into a professional career. He fought as a professional for the rest of the 1920s.

In 1926 Tunney defeated Jack Dempsey in Philadelphia to win the world heavyweight title. In 1927 they fought again at Soldier Field in Chicago. That rematch is remembered for the long count, when a referee’s delay in counting became a famous argument. Tunney retired as champion in 1928.

In 1942 the U.S. Navy opened four pre-flight schools on college campuses. They were at the University of Iowa, the University of North Carolina, the University of Georgia and Saint Mary’s College in California. Cadets spent months there before they began flight training.

Navy officer Tom Hamilton, a former football coach, shaped the program. Cadets took swimming, football, boxing, wrestling and hand-to-hand combat. The Navy hired college coaches as officers to teach them. Each school also fielded a football team that played college teams, such as the Iowa Pre-Flight Seahawks.

The pre-flight schools used college gyms, pools and coaches for a war goal. A cadet might box and wrestle for a few months and never step on a mat again. Yet thousands of young men left these schools with a short, graded course in combat sports on their records.

Combatives is a word from military training. It means fighting skills taught to soldiers as one package, not as separate arts with their own lineages. The U.S. Army printed a field manual called FM 21-150, Combatives, in several editions in the twentieth century. A field manual is an official Army handbook.

In the late 1990s Matt Larsen, a soldier in the 75th Ranger Regiment, began building a new program. It drew on Brazilian jiu-jitsu, wrestling, boxing, judo and Muay Thai. The Army set up a combatives school at Fort Benning, Georgia. In 2002 it published a new manual, FM 3-25.150, Combatives.

The Army program became the Modern Army Combatives Program. It borrowed pieces from arts with long histories in Brazil, Japan, Thailand and elsewhere. It kept what served soldiers and left out the rooms, rituals and teachers of each art. School PE units later borrowed the word combatives from this military use.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 bans sex discrimination in schools that receive federal money. In 1975 the federal government issued the regulations that explained how schools must follow it. Regulations are detailed rules written by a government agency to carry out a law.

One regulation covered physical education classes. Schools could no longer run separate PE classes for boys and girls. A class had to be coeducational, meaning open to students of both sexes. Before this, many schools taught wrestling only to boys and dance only to girls.

The rule had an exception. During wrestling, boxing, rugby, ice hockey, football, basketball and other contact sports, a school could group students by sex inside the class. Teams for school sports follow a different regulation. The PE class rule is about who may enroll, not who may join a varsity team.

A waiver, also called a release, is a paper in which a person gives up a right to sue if they are hurt. In the 1980s, school districts in Washington State asked students and parents to sign waivers before sports. Families who refused could not play. Two families challenged the practice.

In 1988 the Washington Supreme Court decided the case Wagenblast v. Odessa School District. The court ruled that the school waivers were not enforceable. It said school sports are an important public service and families have little choice but to sign. The court used factors from a 1963 California case, Tunkl v. Regents of the University of California.

The ruling did not ban school sports or change how teachers ran practice. It said a school still owes its students a duty of care, the legal duty to act with reasonable safety. A signed paper could not erase that duty. Courts in other states have looked to the case in later disputes.

For many years, Illinois courts held that school districts could not be sued for injuries. This idea is called governmental immunity. In 1959 the Illinois Supreme Court decided Molitor v. Kaneland Community Unit District No. 302. A student hurt in a school bus crash in Kane County had sued the district.

The court ended the old immunity for school districts in that case. School districts across Illinois now faced lawsuits over injuries on buses, playgrounds and in gyms. The General Assembly responded. In 1965 it passed the Local Governmental and Governmental Employees Tort Immunity Act.

A tort is a harm one person causes another that a court can remedy with money. The 1965 act gave schools and their workers protection in many cases, but not all. It left them open to suits for conduct that was willful and wanton, meaning reckless disregard for safety. Illinois gyms and wrestling rooms still work under this law.

In 1487 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III granted a charter to a fencing guild called the Marxbrüder, based in Frankfurt. A guild was an organization of skilled workers that controlled training and licenses. Only guild members could call themselves masters and open schools. Other European cities had their own fencing guilds and licensed masters.

A fencing school was called a salle, from the French word for room. Masters taught paying pupils there with blunted swords. For centuries fencers practiced without face protection. Eye injuries and deaths in practice were a real risk. The master decided when a pupil was ready and signed the pupil’s papers.

In the late 1700s French masters began using a fencing mask made of wire mesh. The French master La Boëssière is often credited with it. The mask let fencers practice at full speed with far less danger. It helped fencing move from a training for duels toward a sport.

In 1891 American fencers founded the Amateur Fencers League of America, or AFLA. It held national championships and set rules for amateur fencing. In 1981 it became the United States Fencing Association. Today the body is called USA Fencing. It later joined the FIE, the world fencing federation founded in Paris in 1913.

Colleges formed their own group in 1894, the Intercollegiate Fencing Association. Eastern universities held team meets under its rules. Fencing grew as a college sport before many campuses had wrestling or basketball teams. College fencers competed with the three weapons: foil, épée and sabre.

The NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, held its first fencing championships in 1941. Fencing now had a national college title, a rule book and a place on the athletic budget. The old master and pupil bond moved into a system of coaches, teams and seasons.

Women first fenced in the Olympic Games in 1924 in Paris, in a single event with the foil. Other weapons stayed closed to women at the Olympics for decades. Women’s épée joined the Games in 1996, and women’s sabre in 2004. Each opening came from a vote of the governing bodies.

In American colleges, women formed the National Intercollegiate Women's Fencing Association in 1929. It ran women’s college championships for more than fifty years. Women’s colleges and coeducational universities in the East sent teams to its meets. The group kept women’s fencing alive while men’s college sport grew under the NCAA.

The NCAA added a women’s fencing championship in 1982, ten years after Title IX. In 1990 the NCAA combined the men’s and women’s events into one team championship. Men and women now score for the same team title. Fencing is one of the few NCAA sports that does this.

On May 14, 1920, leaders of five state high school associations met in Chicago. They came from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin. They formed the Midwest Federation of State High School Athletic Associations. Within a few years it became a national body.

Today it is the National Federation of State High School Associations, or NFHS. It writes playing rules for many high school sports, including wrestling. A state association, like the IHSA in Illinois, runs the tournaments and follows or adapts those rules. Colleges follow separate NCAA rules.

The federation was formed partly to stop colleges and private promoters from running high school contests. The founders wanted school leaders to control school sports. That choice shaped wrestling in America. It became a school sport run by educators, with eligibility rules about grades, age and enrollment.

Dan Gable grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, and wrestled for Iowa State University. He lost only one college match, the 1970 NCAA final, to Larry Owings of Washington. At the 1972 Olympics in Munich he won a gold medal in freestyle wrestling. Reports from the Games note that no opponent scored a point on him.

In 1976 Gable became head coach at the University of Iowa. His teams won 15 NCAA team titles before he retired from coaching in 1997. Iowa City became a center of college wrestling. Crowds filled the university arena for home meets. Iowa’s teams also won 21 Big Ten titles under Gable.

Gable’s story shows how the United States built wrestling through schools and colleges, not through private clubs. College programs produced many American Olympic freestyle wrestlers. American colleges use their own folkstyle rules, which differ from the Olympic freestyle rules. Athletes switch between the two rule books.

Yamashita Yoshitsugu was one of the first students of Kanō Jigorō at the Kodokan, the judo school in Tokyo. He came to the United States in 1903. In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt took judo lessons from him at the White House. Roosevelt wrote about the lessons in letters.

Yamashita then taught judo at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, for a time around 1905. It was one of the first times an American school gave judo a place in its training. His wife, Yamashita Fude, is recorded as teaching judo to American women during their stay. The couple returned to Japan in 1907.

In 1935, after his death, the Kodokan made Yamashita its first tenth dan, its highest rank. His years in America show judo arriving on campus through one teacher, not through a national program. The art came with a Kodokan lineage, but the Naval Academy used it as military training.

Professional sumo in Japan is run by the Japan Sumo Association. Wrestlers live and train in stables, called heya, under a stablemaster. Many enter as teenagers straight from middle school. Others first wrestle in high school and university clubs, which run their own amateur tournaments.

Wajima Hiroshi wrestled for Nihon University in Tokyo and won major student titles. He entered professional sumo in 1970. Because of his amateur record, he was allowed to start in a higher division instead of the lowest. He reached the top rank of yokozuna in 1973.

Wajima won 14 top-division championships. His path showed that a university club could feed the professional sport. Today many top wrestlers come from college sumo. A school room and a professional stable now form two stages of one career. Nihon University and other schools are known for sending wrestlers into the top division.

Wrestlers compete in weight classes, so each athlete faces someone of about the same weight. Many wrestlers tried to lose weight fast before weigh-ins to compete in a lower class. This practice is called cutting weight. It often meant going without water in hot rooms.

Between November and December 1997, three college wrestlers died while cutting weight. They were Billy Saylor of Campbell University in North Carolina, Joseph LaRosa of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Jeff Reese of the University of Michigan. Each died within weeks of the others. Their deaths shocked schools and families.

In 1998 the NCAA changed its rules. It banned rubber suits and saunas for losing weight and moved weigh-ins closer to the start of competition. Later it set a lowest allowed weight for each wrestler, based on a body-fat test. High school associations adopted similar weight plans in the years that followed.

In 2006 Zackery Lystedt, a 13-year-old football player in Maple Valley, Washington, suffered a brain injury. He had returned to a game after a blow to the head. The injury left him with lasting disabilities. His family worked with doctors and lawmakers to change the rules.

In 2009 Washington passed the Lystedt Law. It had three main parts. Schools must teach athletes, parents and coaches about concussion, a brain injury caused by a blow or jolt. An athlete who may have one must be removed from play, and may return only with written clearance from a licensed health care provider.

Other states copied the model, and by 2014 every state had a youth concussion law. The laws cover wrestling, judo clubs in schools and other contact sports, not only football. Illinois passed its own school concussion laws. A single injury in one state changed rules in gyms across the country.

Olympic boxers wore headgear, padded head guards, from 1984 on. Many people assumed headgear made the sport safer. In 2013 the world amateur boxing body, then called AIBA, removed headgear for elite men’s bouts. Women and youth boxers kept it. The Olympic rule for men had lasted nearly thirty years.

AIBA said its own medical data supported the change. Some doctors disagreed and asked for more research. The same year AIBA adopted the ten-point must scoring system, the system used in professional boxing. Men boxed without headgear at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

The change shows that safety rules are claims that can be tested and argued. A school, a college and a world federation may reach different answers about the same equipment. USA Boxing kept headgear for youth events. Each body writes rules for its own athletes.

Coaches in judo, boxing and taekwondo begin every session with a warm-up. Sports science backs them: warm muscles contract faster and stretch further before they strain.

1. Practice where a grown-up knows what you are doing. Clear a space at least two big steps wide all around.

2. Do a dynamic warm-up for five to eight minutes: jog in place, arm circles, leg swings, walking lunges, hip circles.

3. Save long, held stretches for after practice, when the muscles are warm.

4. Watch the move in the Dojo. Learn it step by step, slowly, before adding speed.

5. Never snap an elbow or knee fully straight. Stop just short of locking the joint.

What helps: practice both sides. Short sessions on many days build skill faster than one long session. Sleep helps a new skill settle.

Stay safe: solo and into the air, never at a person. Kicks stay at knee or belly height until your balance is steady. Falls only on a mat or soft grass. Stop if something hurts.

Judo reached U.S. colleges in the twentieth century, and San Jose State became a center of collegiate judo. Every program starts with ukemi. Today laws on head injuries in youth sports, such as Illinois’s 2011 law, show why protecting the head matters. A safe breakfall spreads the impact so no single spot takes it all.

1. Sit on a mat with legs forward and arms reaching in front. A spotter or grown-up is near.

2. Tuck your chin to your chest and round your back.

3. Roll back. As your shoulders meet the mat, slap with both arms, palms down, about 45 degrees from your body.

4. Let the roll carry you back up to sitting.

What helps: the curve of your back turns the fall into a roll, and the arm slap adds more area to the landing. Pressure is force divided by area, so a bigger area means less pressure on any one spot.

Stay safe: only on a mat or soft grass. Keep your chin tucked so your head never meets the mat.

Judo throws often land a person on their side, so the side breakfall (yoko ukemi) is drilled thousands of times. Coaches start from a squat to keep the drop short.

1. On a mat, squat low with both arms forward. A grown-up or spotter is near.

2. Reach your right leg and right arm across in front of your body.

3. Roll down onto your right side, chin tucked, eyes on your belt.

4. Slap the mat with your right arm, palm down, about 45 degrees from your body. Your legs land apart, not stacked.

5. Sit up and do the left side.

What helps: a lower start means less height, so less speed at landing. Gravity speeds you up the farther you drop.

Stay safe: on a mat or soft grass only. Never reach out with a straight arm to catch yourself; that is how wrists and collarbones get hurt.