<p>Speaking to the "coattail effect," one of the first uses of "Ivy League" was recorded at a Columbia-Penn football game. Hardly HYP exclusive...</p>
<p>From <a href="http://www.ivysport.com/history%5B/url%5D">http://www.ivysport.com/history</a> :</p>
<p>The time was Thursday afternoon, October 14, 1937. The setting was the sports department of the New York Herald-Tribune. Assignments were being made for coverage of the leading college football games of the week. The late George Daley, sports editor, and Irving Marsh, assistant sports editor, were making up the list.</p>
<p>To Stanley Woodward, even then a veteran and brilliant football writer, went the Pittsburgh-Fordham game at the Polo Grounds in New York. This was the game New Yorkers wanted most to read about, which was reason enough for Woodward to cover. He was then and is now one of the ablest writers the gridiron has produced in his years; and his years as a sports writer go back to about 1920.</p>
<p>When the other staff men got their assignments, Caswell Adams drew the Columbia-Pennsylvania game at Columbia's Baker Field in New York.</p>
<p>Now, Mr. Adams, who is in these days the erudite boxing expert of the New York Journal-American [Editor's note: Remember this was written in 1956], had no quarrel with either Columbia or Pennsylvania. Both, in his considered judgment, were and are splendid old institutions of higher learning. He was, however, able to restrain with relative ease his enthusiasm for football as played in that day by a number of teams representing the more venerable centers of higher education in the East. This was in the heyday of Fordham University as a major football power; and Mr. Adams is a Fordham man.</p>
<p>Briefly, Piquantly, without rancor, he expressed his views to the editor.</p>
<p>"Whyinell," he inquired, "do I have to watch the ivy grow every Saturday afternoon? How about letting me see some football away from the ivy-covered halls of learning for a change?"</p>
<p>He did not press the point. There was a Friday night boxing match coming up in Madison Square Garden, and he had an advance story to write. He forgot the matter.</p>
<p>But Stanley Woodward, at a nearby typewriter, did not forget. He had heard a new phrase. Ivy-covered? Ivy group? Ivy League?" These old schools of the East did not like leagues. They had long shunned the conference idea. Stanley likes to ruffle them occasionally and chuckled when he did so. Why not call these colleges the "Ivy League"?</p>
<p>Woodward wrote the weekly football review for the Herald-Tribune on Monday mornings. It was a review read with care by football men, including and especially football coaches. I recall one coach who was accustomed for several seasons to inquire of Stanley each week what game he was to cover. The coach would then forego scouting arrangements for that game. He knew Woodward's Sunday story and Monday morning technical analysis would tell him and his strategists all they needed to know about any rival.</p>
<p>So a few days later, though not on the Monday morning immediately following, there crept unobtrusively into a Woodward football essay the phrase "...and in the Ivy League..." as introduction to a discussion of what was happening on the fields of the East's oldest colleges which, even then and without a semblance of formal grouping, were natural and traditional rivals. Set down alphabetically, they were, of course, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale.</p>
<p>The phrase caught on. Other writers soon picked it up. Then football enthusiasts began to use it in conversation. Before long even some of the academicians began to adopt it. Few who used it knew, or even wondered, about its origin.</p>
<p>Now it has indeed come into the language. To opportunistic advertisers it is a phrase which carries the connotation of smartness in the wearing apparel of young Americans of college age. A national network radio show of some popularity made its own adaptation. To the high school senior choosing the school he hopes he attends there are two groups -- The Ivy and the others.</p>
<p>Educationally it has come to be actually a useful phrase, with scope reaching far beyond the confines and the campuses of the eight to which it was first so lightly and so aptly applied. It represents now in the public mind an educational philosophy that is old and established, but modern, too, and independent and unafraid. At first many believed it carried a connotation of smugness, conservatism, wealth. More and more are learning each year that this is not true.</p>
<p>When applied to athletics, Ivy League --- I guess the quotation marks can be dropped now --- implies a definite state of mind and set of principles, not at all the monopoly of the old Eastern colleges, but certainly the result in large part of their leadership. It is a state of mind in which intercollegiate sports competition is a completely integrated phase of the undergraduate liberal arts education; in which eligibility standards are reasoned, exacting, and honorably observed; in which the so called "athletic scholarship" is non-existent; in which academic officers assume full responsibility for sports administration.</p>
<p>All-American football players may be relatively few in the Ivy League in the future, but competition is rugged and exciting. It will be the competition of boys who play, not of downtown Boosters Clubs and recruiting organizations. It will be competition free of the troubles which still beset many of the younger but strangely more old-fashioned institutions in many parts of the country.</p>
<p>I saw Cas Adams not long ago at Baker Field, where Columbia College, the undergraduate college of 2,300 men in Columbia University; plays the only major football left in New York City.</p>
<p>I asked him if his contribution of an idea and, with Stanley Woodward, of a phrase to the American lexicon has brought him formal scholarly recognition from one or more of the institutions included in the now officially constituted Ivy League.</p>
<p>He said no.</p>