By Shawn Proctor

George Guida, an early member of the Irish Pipeline to Villanova, in 1946.

Irish runners and Villanova Athletics. For more than five decades, the pairing was synonymous, resulting in medals and championships in the highest levels of collegiate and world track competition.

Yesterday Marcus O’Sullivan ’84, Villanova Men’s Track and Field Coach, and Beaudry Rae Allen ’13 MA, Preservation and Digital Archivist, discussed this era of fleet Irish feet at the talk “Irish Pipeline: Irish Athletics at Villanova,” co-sponsored by the Center for Irish Studies and Falvey Memorial Library.

In all, this pipeline of talent, beginning in 1948, included all 50 states and 715 athletes, and was a benefit to both scholar-athletes and the programs they joined. Dig deeper into this storied tradition with these resources:

• Ian O’Riordan. “How US scholarships won over Irish athletics; For many years the American scholarship trail was signposted as the only way for Irish athletes to succeed in the sport.” The Irish Times. April 27, 2020 Monday. https://advance-lexis-com.ezp1.villanova.edu/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:5YS6-4MV1-DYS1-037W-00000-00&context=1516831.

Excerpt: “The Pipeline, as the American scholarship trail was originally known, soon spread far beyond Villanova University, the small rural-like campus 12 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Villanova, however, is where the connection still runs strongest.”

• Christopher Graziano. “Track Record of Excellence: More than ever, Villanova is a destination school for the world’s finest student-athletes in track and field”. Villanova Magazine. Spring 2016. https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/ucomm/documents/VM_Spring2016.pdf.

Excerpt: “Wildcats also have vaulted to glory in global competitions, including at least one Villanova Track and Field Olympian in every Summer Olympics since 1948. Beginning with the 1956 Summer Games…Villanovans have won 11 gold and silver medals in track and field events.”

• “George Guida, 93; Track Star Was Key to ’Nova’s ‘Irish Pipeline.’” Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), 2015. http://search.ebscohost.com.ezp1.villanova.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgov&AN=edsgcl.428634855.
• Irish Studies Resource Guide: https://library.villanova.edu/research/subject-guides/global-interdisciplinary-studies/irish-studies.

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is a Communications and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

Are you interested in sports medicine? Athletics marketing and advertising? Sports psychology? The sociology of sport? Sports studies is an interdisciplinary field and it can be hard to know where to search for information. Falvey Memorial Library has a solution for you!

We have arranged for campus-wide trial access to SPORTDiscus with Full Text, an online database for articles and other materials on all aspects of the study of sport.

SPORTDiscus provides access to the scholarly and popular literature of sport, including medical, social, biomechanical, business and management, public health, and psychological aspects of the topic. It offers indexing and full text of scholarly journals, magazines, books, conference proceedings, dissertations, and more. Coverage is international and goes back to 1800.

Full text journals covered include everything from NCAA News, Soccer & Society, and the Journal of Sport History, to Kinesiology Review, the International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sports, and the Entertainment & Sports Law Journal.

“Sport studies is a very interdisciplinary area, and until now Villanova hasn’t had a library resource that could help a researcher get access to all facets of the topic at once. SPORTDiscus with Full Text is the premier resource for the study of sport,” says Susan Turkel, Social Sciences Librarian.

To access, click here: SPORTDiscus with Full Text  or navigate to the database from the library’s Databases A-Z listing.

Villanova has trial access to this resource through November 30, 2019. Please contact Susan Turkel (susan.turkel@villanova.edu) or another subject librarian if you’d like to recommend this database for purchase by the library.

The London Olympics officially open tonight and just this week we’ve digitized a short book on fencing and other sports. The lengthy title of this book seems like it’s in inverse proportion to its diminutive size: How to Fence: containing full instruction for fencing and the use of the broadsword also instruction in archery, described with twenty-one practical illustrations. A complete book. And that’s not even all there is in the book!

“The Engage” (fencing position).

At just about 60 pages, this “complete book” includes instructions for fencing (p. 5), archery (p. 43), hurdle racing (p. 57), pole-vaulting (p. 58), hammer throwing (p. 59), and shot put (p. 60). The “practical illustrations” only appear in the fencing section, however, so you must use your imagination for the other sports (or perhaps watch some Olympic athletes in the next few days).

The books we rescued.

This book was part of a collection of extremely fragile late-19th- and early-20th-century publications that we recently found in a forgotten corner of the library basement, where they would have been destined for the trash if we hadn’t saved them. Many of these publications are extremely rare and have not been digitized elsewhere, so we are excited to be preserving and sharing them. Among these books are short plays, humorous anecdotes, and “dime novels.” We’ll be posting more about some of these titles as we digitize them and Demian will be adding some to our ongoing Project Gutenberg proofreading project, so stay tuned for more!

P.S.: For more Olympic spirit, you can read about Villanova athletes in the Olympics in our digitized collection of The Villanovan. For instance, in the 1956 Summer Olympic Games, held in Australia from November 22 to December 8, two Nova track stars (Charley Jenkins and Ron Delany) brought home 3 gold medals — making Villanova track coach “Jumbo” Jim Elliott “the first American college coach to produce two Olympic winners” (p. 1). You can find more articles by searching the Digital Library’s Villanovan collection.

Students at Villanova College played baseball, and indeed had great sport at playing other teams. Not only did they play other local colleges but they also played amateur teams, like the St. Charles Seminary team, throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. Two newly digitized scorebooks document these early Villanova College baseball games and show the historic development of collegiate baseball. Indeed the earliest recorded Villanova game of the “Villanova 9” just after the end of the U.S. Civil War, November 12, 1866 was a great blowout with the Villanova College team scoring a winning 46 runs to 13 against the amateur team, the “Picked Nine”.

As part of the growing Athletics Collection of the Villanova Digital Library, these box scores allow the reader to visualize the games as they transpired.

There is no one method of scoring a baseball game. Many different methods prevailed during the development of the modern game. In 1874 Henry Chadwick, known as the father of baseball score keeping, noted, “It is about time that one system of scoring should be adapted throughout the country” [Dickson, 9]. That development never happened, as different publishers produced competing versions. From the 1860’s to the mid-1890, Villanova used a more free form of scorebook, but Villanova scorers switched to the more detailed Caylor System in the late 1899s that included the now common “box score” for recording hits, runs, and fielding outs. The first known scorecard for a professional game was produced for the game between the Brooklyn Atlantics and the Philadelphia Athletics on October 11, 1866 [Light, 832]. Collegiate records are much more fragmented, but the dates of these Villanova scorebooks makes them among the earliest in the country.

Scorebooks remain an essential part of documenting athletic competitions. Indeed today every major league baseball game is required to have an official scorekeeper and scorebook [Light, 833].

Sources:

Paul Dickson. The Joy of Keeping Score: How scoring the game has influenced and enhanced the history of baseball. New York: Walker and Company, 2007.

Jonathan Fraser Light. The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball. Second edition. McFarland & Company, 2005.