Soccer Offers Real He-Man Exercise
Association football, or soccer, was played at Acadia University for a few years in the 1870s and 1880s. By 1883, rugby had replaced soccer and it was not until the 1920s that soccer again became a campus sport. Although mainly played in interclass competitions, there were varsity teams in the late 1920s and late 1940s. The January 1928 Athenaeum claimed: “This year, the first Soccer team ever to represent Acadia played off a game with Windsor, the semi-finalists in Nova Scotia Championships, and defeated them by a score of 5-4.”
By 1937, soccer was an established interclass sport at Acadia. Writing in the December Athenaeum that year, William Feindel commented: “For non-rugger players who want real he-man exercise and a chance to get some good autumn aether drawn into (or knocked out of) their lungs, soccer comes in rather convenient.” There is little evidence of town-based soccer during the 1870 to 1950 period and no evidence that girls or women played soccer.
(Acadia Athenaeum, January 1928, 58)
