***This is a really cool article that gives a brief history about the beginnings of track and field competition at the University of Utah. Many thanks to Roy Webb for giving us a little more insight into just how deep rooted this sport is in Utah culture.***
Fielding questions and keeping track of the U’s deep tradition in the sports.
By Roy Webb
By Roy Webb
Track and field competition has a long history at the University of Utah, starting even before the school moved to its present location in 1898. As early as the 1880s, there were “University Days” at what is now Nibley Park (in South Salt Lake) that featured races and athletic contests. In May 1895, the first track and field competition between the University of Utah and the Brigham Young Academy was held in Provo. In that competition, and many subsequent contests, the U dominated the other schools in almost every aspect of the sport. These early competitions were not well organized, however, and often resulted in spectators crowding onto the track and chasing the runners “like a stampeding herd, amid yells of triumph and dismay,” according to Walter A. Kerr’s Intercollegiate Athletics, University of Utah, 1892-1945. On occasion, they even resulted in “red-hot slugging matches” between partisans of the two schools “in which Easter bonnets were wrecked beyond identification.” Within a few years, things settled down to a more orderly routine, and by World War I the University was participating in track and field competitions both within the state and around the region. An article in The Daily Utah Chronicle from April 1919 noted that “Cummings field is fairly alive with track and baseball men every night. The advent of good weather has caused a host of athletes to hie to the old grid field for competition and spring training.”
The “young and enthusiastic” coach Ike Armstrong (as Kerr described him in his book) was hired in 1924, and besides coaching football, he encouraged all male students to try out for track and field. One problem was the lack of a field house where athletes could train in bad weather, but that was rectified with the construction of the Einar Nielsen Field House in 1939.
By that time, women, too, were beginning to compete in intramural track contests, although an organized team was still in the future. World War II interrupted most athletic competition at the University, but in the 1950s, under coach Pete Couch, “Utah cindermen” like Fred Pratley BS’57, Gerald Tovey ex’55, and Herb Nakken BS’57 set state and regional records. Throughout the ensuing decades, University track and field teams, both men and women, continued to prove that the University of Utah was a force to be reckoned with in any kind of athletic competition.
—Roy Webb BA’84 MS’91 is a multimedia archivist with the J. Willard Marriott Library.
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