Blanche Trilling and the Evils of Competition (continued)

As early as the 1897-98 academic year, Wisconsin's Board of Visitors had expressed relief that the women's physical culture department had escaped "the disturbing element of athletics" that plagued men's sports.²⁶ Many concluded that women's athletics must be spared the horrors that had befallen the men's program, whatever the cost. Women's athletics, therefore, were from the beginning a reactionary measure, and strictly controlled; over time, they developed into a sports program different in kind from the male counterpart.²⁷

At the helm of Wisconsin women's athletics, Blanche Trilling was a proponent of girls' rules, and fervently believed that competition was an unnecessary and exclusionary evil. Like most physical educators of her day, she saw yet another danger in the competitive environment—the neglect of the majority of students in favor of catering to a few superstars. Wisconsin's Athletic Director George Little, whose jurisdiction included both the men's and the women's departments, began the Athletics for All campaign, designed to get as many students as possible, regardless of ability, involved in sports. Likewise, Trilling was a staunch supporter of club and intramural systems, and doubtless contributed to the WAA's great influence and longevity.

Meanwhile, Trilling began to play an increasing important role on the national stage. In 1917, in one of the first efforts to create a unified governing body for women's college athletics, Trilling hosted a meeting of WAA students and faculty from 23 universities across the Midwest. The following year, the meeting was national in scope, and a new regulatory agency for women's sports was born, the Athletic Conference of American College Women (ACACW).

In accordance with Trilling's principles, the ACACW emphasized collaboration between a university's physical education department and the campus WAA, fostered student participation in the organization and administration of activities, and officially discouraged intercollegiate play.²⁸ In 1933, the group became the Athletic Federation of College Women (AFCW), the leading authority regarding women's sports for the next several decades.

Trilling was a persuasive speaker, and unflinchingly rallied for her cause at every opportunity— in professional correspondence, in speeches, in the press. She was a member of the Board of Governors of the National Amateur Athletics Federation (NAAF), and sat on the executive committee for that group's Women's Division. The latter was convened in 1923 by Mrs. Herbert Hoover, President of the Girl Scouts (her husband, future President Herbert Hoover, was then US Secretary of Commerce).