Walter Camp

This article is about the American football coach. For the railroad expert and writer, see Walter Mason Camp. For other uses, see Walter Camp (disambiguation).

Walter Camp
Camp in 1910
Sport(s)	Football
Biographical details
Born	(1859-04-07)April 7, 1859 New Britain, Connecticut
Died	March 14, 1925(1925-03-14) (aged 65) New York, New York
Playing career
1876–1882	Yale
Coaching career (HC unless noted)
1888–1892 1892, 1894–1895	Yale Stanford
Head coaching record
Overall	79–5–3
Statistics College Football Data Warehouse
Accomplishments and honors
Championships 3 National (1888, 1891–1892)
College Football Hall of Fame Inducted in 1951 (profile)

Walter Chauncey Camp (April 7, 1859 – March 14, 1925) was an American football player, coach, and sports writer known as the "Father of American Football". With John Heisman, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Pop Warner, Fielding H. Yost, and George Halas, Camp was one of the most accomplished persons in the early history of American football. He played college football at Yale College from 1876 to 1882. Camp served as the head football coach at Yale from 1888 to 1892 before moving to Stanford University, where he coached in December 1892 and in 1894 and 1895. Camp's Yale teams of 1888, 1891, and 1892 have been recognized as national champions. Camp was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1951.

Bold text==Life== walter Camp was born in the city of New Britain, Connecticut, the son of Everett Lee and Ellen Sophia (Cornwell) Camp. He attended New Haven, entered Yale College in 1875, and graduated in 1882. At Yale he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, the Linonian Society, and Skull and Bones. He attended Yale Medical School from 1880 to 1883, where his studies were interrupted first by an outbreak of typhoid fever and then by work for the Manhattan Watch Company. He worked for the New Haven Clock Company beginning in 1883, working his way up to chairman of the board of directors. In 1873 Walter Camp attended a meeting where representatives from Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, and Yale universities created the intercollegiate football association(IFA). They created the rule that each team is only allowed 15 plays per drive.

On June 30, 1888, Camp married Alice Graham Sumner, sister of William Graham Sumner. They had two children: Walter Camp, Jr. (born 1891) who attended Yale as well and was elected as a member of Scroll and Key in 1912, and Janet Camp Troxell (born 1897).

Rules committee

Camp as he appears at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Writing

Despite having a full-time job at the New Haven Clock Company (A Camp Family Business) and being an unpaid yet very involved adviser to the Yale football team, Camp wrote articles and books on gridiron and also on sports in general. By the time of his death, he had written nearly 30 books and more than 250 magazine articles. His articles appeared in national periodicals such as Harper's Weekly, Collier's, Outing, Outlook, and The Independent, and in juvenile magazines such as St. Nicholas, Youth's Companion, and Boys' Magazine. His stories also appeared in major daily newspapers throughout the United States. He also selected an annual "All-American" team. According to his biographer, Richard P. Borkowski, "Camp was instrumental through writing and lecturing in attaching an almost mythical atmosphere of manliness and heroism to the game not previously known in American team sports."

By the age of 33, twelve years after graduating from Yale, Walter Camp had already become known as the "Father of Football". In a column in the popular magazine Harper's Weekly, sports columnist Caspar Whitney had applied the nickname; the sobriquet was appropriate because, by 1892, Camp had almost single-handedly fashioned the game of modern American football.

The Daily Dozen exercise regimen

Camp was a proponent of exercise, and not just for the athletes he coached. While working as an adviser to the United States military during World War I, he devised a program to help servicemen become more physically fit.

Walter Camp has just developed for the Naval Commission on Training Camp Activities a "short hand" system of setting up exercises that seems to fill the bill; a system designed to give a man a running jump start for the serious work of the day. It is called the "daily dozen set-up," meaning thereby twelve very simple exercises.

Both the Army and the Navy used Camp's methods.

The names of the exercises in the original Daily Dozen, as the whole set became known, were hands, grind, crawl, wave, hips, grate, curl, weave, head, grasp, crouch, and wing. As the name indicates, there were twelve exercises, and they could be completed in about eight minutes. A prolific writer, Camp wrote a book explaining the exercises and extolling their benefits. During the 1920s, a number of newspapers and magazines used the term "Daily Dozen" to refer to exercise in general.

Starting in 1921 with the Musical Health Builder record sets, Camp began offering morning setting-up exercises to a wider market. In 1922, the initiative reached the new medium of radio.^{[citation needed]}

Head coaching record

Camp as Yale's captain in 1878

Year	Team	Overall	Conference	Standing	Bowl/playoffs
Yale Bulldogs (Intercollegiate Football Association) (1888–1892)
1888	Yale	13–0
1889	Yale	15–1
1890	Yale	13–1
1891	Yale	13–0
1892	Yale	13–0
Yale:		67–2
Stanford (Independent) (1892)
1892	Stanford	2–0–2
Stanford (Independent) (1894–1895)
1894	Stanford	6–3
1895	Stanford	4–0–1
Stanford:		12–3–3
Total:		79–5–3
National championship         Conference title         Conference division title

See also

• List of college football head coaches with non-consecutive tenure

Bibliography

• Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics, (1990)
• "Walter Camp Found All-American Eleven Selections and Originated the Daily Dozen." New York Times, March 15, 1925. p. 1.

External links

• Walter Camp at the College Football Hall of Fame
• Walter Camp at the College Football Data Warehouse
• Works by Walter Camp at Project Gutenberg
• Walter Camp at Find a Grave
• Walter Camp (1912). Condensed auction for the busy man. NY: Platt & Peck.