Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/174

 in the evening from exhaustion, and if he is to be alert and fresh the next day he must get to bed soon. All this, if he is wise, and he often is, teaches him some of the most valuable lessons he can learn in college—the value of concentration and the value of utilizing his spare hours, and these lessons are valuable not only during his undergraduate days but immeasurably more so when he gets out of college into the more trying and strenuous work of life.

More and more the athlete is learning the value of self-control and morality. The young fellow in training learns to control his temper, for he finds often that when he loses control of his temper he loses control of himself. He learns, too, to take adverse criticism without being offended by it, for he soon sees that to take offense gets him nowhere. He learns not to expect praise for work well done, but to be pleased if his efforts do not bring upon him a storm of criticism and reproach. The hard physical exercise which the man in training gets, helps him in the control of his physical passions; if a man wants to live a decent clean moral life, he will find that the strenuous exercise he gets in the development of athletic ability will help him toward this end more than almost anything else. The man, on the other hand, whose moral ideals might not be otherwise high, is not infrequently led to see that he must choose between a self-controlled, temperate, clean life and failure to accomplish his highest possibilities in athletics. In all my experience with undergraduates I have seen few things that would act more vigorously as a discourager of immoral practices than an ambition for success in athletics, I have seen over and over again