An Old New Sport: A century ago, fieldball made its debut as a varsity sport in Frederick County, where it thrived before finally disappearing | college sports

On Wednesday, Frederick High School will host the first public flag football game for girls in high school in Maryland history.

It’s a fitting year for Frederick County to be a pioneer of a new high school fall sport for girls, considering something similar existed 100 years earlier.

On October 11, 1923, fieldball — an 11-on-11 outdoor game in which players used their hands to pass the ball and throw it in the goal to score points — made its debut as a new high- School Sports for Girls in Frederick District.

Two games were played that day. Host Frederick defeated Thurmont 13-0 and host Middletown defeated Brunswick 5-4. According to an October 12, 1923 article in the Frederick Daily News, these were the first field ball games in Maryland to be played outside of Baltimore County.

Other counties in Maryland soon began practicing the sport, and it remained a mainstay for girls in the state well into the late 1940s.

But fieldball eventually faded away as a high school sport for girls in Maryland. The reasons are unclear.

Today the sport is all but forgotten.

The Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association, the governing body for public collegiate athletics in the state, lists field ball state champions from 1946-1948 in its fall record book.

Frederick High is among the national field ball champions listed in this record book, and remnants of this once powerful program remain.

Some of these were discovered a few years ago by Frank Strakonsky, Frederick High’s longtime cross-country coach, at a real estate auction at the Frederick Fairgrounds. Strakonsky purchased some fieldball medals awarded to a Frederick athlete by the Playground Athletic League, which was the governing body for high school sports in Maryland prior to the formation of the MPSSAA.

“To come across something like that, that old, that was something,” Strakonsky said. “And especially the connection to Frederick High School.”

The medals are now displayed in a trophy box at the school.

Also hanging on a wall in Frederick High School’s gymnasium are banners featuring state championship fieldballs from 1937, 1938, 1947, and 1948. A few years ago, they piqued the curiosity of some Middletown High School basketball players who were visiting Frederick for an away game.

“They talked about it and tried to figure out what [field ball] and I explained it to them,” said longtime Frederick girls’ lacrosse coach and school historian Brandon Brewbaker. “They said, ‘That’s pretty awesome.'”

explain the sport

Answers are given in a 1939–40 women’s track and field rule book that includes sections for fieldball, soccer, and speedball. The field ball division was created by Louis R. Burnett, MD, the Baltimore director of health and physical education, and incorporates revisions from the 1937 “Soccer Committee.”

“Fieldball is effectively basketball with rules adapted from a soccer field,” states the book, published for the National Section of Women’s Athletics of the American Association For Health, Physical Education and Recreation. “It has a lot in common with football but maybe more strenuous as the game is more continuous.”

The official ball was a soccer ball, although a basketball or volleyball could also be used by mutual agreement of the coaches.

It was usually played on a soccer field. The goals had upright posts that were eight yards apart on the goal line and a crossbar that was eight ft off the ground. Scoring circles were semi-circles, each having a 15-yard radius from the center of each goal.

According to the rules, an official team consisted of five forwards, three halfbacks, two fullbacks and the running guard. All players except for the running guard, who had to stay in the semicircle in front of the goal, had free access to any part of the pitch.

A game began with a throw-off, and the team taking the throw-off had to line up at or behind the center line of the field. The ball was thrown from the middle of the field with or without a run-up to the center line. The throw had to reach at least five meters into the opposing half of the field.

The ball had to be thrown to a teammate or bounced back – handovers were not allowed. Whoever catches or picks up the ball must throw it within three seconds.

Defenders had to be at least five yards from the throwers when attempting to protect them, unless the throwers were in the scoring circle. In this case, a defender could engage in “basketball guard” by standing near the pitcher, although contact with the ball or pitcher is not allowed.

An attacking team scored two points for a ball scored from outside the scoring circle and one point for a ball scored from inside the scoring circle. A goal from a penalty free throw was worth one point.

Also, a defending team received a point if an opponent threw the ball over the crossbar, unless the ball struck a part of the defender’s body or clothing in transit.

In an article that then-Allegany County High School athletic director Minerva Stern wrote for the February 1924 issue of Mind and Body, a monthly sports magazine, it discussed how fieldball helped prepare girls for basketball in the winter.

And while a 1923 Frederick News-Post article called fieldball a “replacement” for volleyball as a fall sport for girls, Stern mentioned another goal.

“Fieldball appears to have emerged to solve the problem of how to fund hockey teams in high schools,” Stern wrote.

No special equipment was required. Just a ball, a field and goals.

In the “Girls’ Soccer” section of its fall book, the MPSSAA lists the public school fieldball championships that were held from 1946 to 1948 and refers to the sport as a “precursor to girls’ soccer.”

But Sheldon Shealer, a Frederick High School graduate and local sports historian, said fieldball is a kind of variation on team handball, which was an outdoor sport but is now an indoor sport at the Olympics.

“[Field ball] has just become a sport that schools across the state of Maryland are offering as an extension of their physical education classes and curriculum,” said Shealer.

Like many of this year’s Frederick County flag football players, the county’s fieldball players 100 years ago were rookies in need of instruction. One such learning session took place at Frederick High School on September 17, 1923, when teacher Betty Boyle was explaining the game to a group of 70 girls.

A Frederick Daily News article on the introduction said that Boyle “gave a blackboard presentation in which she outlined some of the basic moves of the new game.”

The Frederick players proved quick learners, going 4-1-1 in the 1923 regular season and taking the county crown by beating Middletown 5-1 in a tie-break game at Frederick High on November 22 . This win was revenge for Frederick’s 7-4 loss to Middletown earlier in the season.

Following that triumph, The Frederick News-Post reported that Frederick would ‘tour’ and head to Allegany County and the East Coast to compete against teams from those areas. The newspaper also stated that each Frederick player would receive a PAL gold medal since the games would be played under the auspices of the Playground Athletic League.

However, this was not the last fieldball game played in Frederick County in 1923. According to the Frederick Daily News, Frederick County had a minor school league consisting of Emmitsburg and Liberty High Schools, and Myersville, New Market, and Walkersville Junior High Schools.

Walkersville won the Small Schools title by capping off their unbeaten season on November 27 with a 3-0 win over Liberty (from Libertytown).

County crowns would become commonplace for Frederick High, dubbed “Orange and Black” (a nod to the team’s former colors) and “Cadettes” in articles about the team.

“Frederick High was an absolute force in this sport from the start,” Shealer said. “First at the county level, mainly because of the size of the school compared to all other schools. That was driver number one. You basically had the equivalent of today’s 4As playing a group of 1As. So it’s no surprise that Frederick High dominated.”

Based on records he compiled, Shealer said that Frederick’s fieldball team played 75-1-1 from 1923 to 1939 and won 17 county championships and four state championships from 1923 to 1948.

When fieldball resumed after the closure of track and field caused by World War II, Frederick continued to thrive. After losing to Kenwood in the 1946 state championship game, Frederick won state crowns in 1947 and 1948, defeating Annapolis in the Class A championship game in both years.

Another Frederick County state title contender was Middletown, which lost to Federalsburg in the 1946 Class D finals and to Centerville in the 1947 Class C finals.

The MPSSAA does not list field ball state champions after 1948. And Brewbaker said the last record he set for fieldball at Frederick High was in 1953.

So what happened to the field ball?

Shealer attempted to answer the question of what had happened to the sport, pointing out that there appeared to have been a downsizing in women’s athletics during this period.

Shealer said, “A lot of the sports that the girls played were no longer contested in terms of a full season, they were contested in a one-day field day where they got literally every high school to send girls like Baker Park.” , and they played volleyball and fieldball and did it all in one day, and that became the trope of many of the early 1950s that replaced the more organized, one-season fieldball.”

At some point, however, fieldball was no longer held as a university sport.

Of course, these days, Frederick County girls don’t lack for fall sports to choose from. For decades, county high schools have offered soccer, field hockey, volleyball, golf, and cross-country skiing every fall.

And this year, 100 years after fieldball made its debut in the county, flag football joins that list.