Foreword

HE outstanding event of the school year has been the Inter-Residential School

Athletic Meet or, as it is called amongst us, the inter-school Olympiad, made
possible by the sympathy and support of the Department of Indian Affairs. It is quite
natural my mind should center on that subject as a foreword.

The need for friendly competition in sports has been felt by Indian Residential
Schools for many years and the Meet we have just consummated has broken the undesir-
able but unavoidable isolation which has prevailed.

It is now universally admitted that inter-school sports answer deep-seated needs
essential to a boy’s or a girl’s fullest development and education. It is also evident that
sports and inter-school sports are the prototypes of the great lines of human interest,
endeavor and achievement represented in adult life and educational work today.

Relating inter-school sports to their educational and social significance includes the
universal passion and admiration of achievement in physical activity, bodily skill and
prowess in sports. Athletics today have the same roots as those interests which once
determined a race’s supremacy and inspired song and story. They are also essentially and
fundamentally related to vigour and health and in the field of physical education are
paramount in importance.

Let me say also that inter-school sports give a stimulus to attainment in athletic
ability. In friendly contest we are conscious of a desire to exert ourselves to the limit.
There is an incentive to make a supreme effort. The spiritual value of competition in
which our boys and girls are absolutely engrossed is the MAXIMUM OF EFFORT which
it calls forth. In life, in the majority of cases, the chief difference between men in the
presence of a crisis, lies in the capacity for supreme effort. This capacity is part of our
character. Competition in sports is an essential in the moral training of boys and girls,
inasmuch as without it few, if any, will ever reach a maximum of development of the
will and the capacity to try—(I firmly believe “Education needs play and play needs
education”).

Coqualeetzans, I congratulate you with all my heart upon the distinction you have
won for yourselves and the honour you have brought to your school. It is good and
right that you should be congratulated, but it would be a sad day for you and for our
school were it ever to come to pass that any of you, even the most disappointed of you,
could not rejoice in your opponent’s success. It is a noble quality to rejoice in another’s
success. Could you do it? I believe you could. You have always endeavored to—what we
have so often said to one another—“Play the game.” Some of you will be leaving us so
let us say, ‘Play the Game” in life’s field of labour. To you all, “Godspeed and
Good Luck.”

“Coqualeetza,”
Sardis, B. C.,
June 20th, 1931.

PRINCIPAL

Three