"Great peoples are lovers of games and sports."

Handwritten on undated notes for a speech during his presidency of Ripon, the sentiment reflects a lifelong belief for Dr. Silas Evans. An 1898 graduate of the school he would later lead, Dr. Evans was a standout athlete, serving as captain of the football team, track team record holder, and baseball pitcher. For this, and for his later leadership, he would be known as "Ripon's most illustrious son" in his time, and in retrospect. 

In a bisected 29-year tenure as president, overlapping with immense social upheaval, global conflict and financial unrest, Dr. Evans found himself watching college athletics, among everything else, develop and grow into something separated from his own sporting experience. These changes in athletics, so often fostering a bitter cling to nostalgia, kindled instead a great pride and hope in Dr. Evans. 

"Look into the athletic questions at Colleges," Dr. Evans wrote in a 1924 speech to the student body. "The practice in this field is far more honorable than it used to be. Men are now more sincerely trained to play to the rules of the game rather than to the blindness of the umpire. Advantage gained by a trick is less esteemed than formerly by the school who gets the point… Let us settle into a proper sensing of honor in the cheer so that while loyal, hopeful, and contributing to the last mead of lung to the boys we want to see win, there is at the same time a game and sportsmanlike honor… Let there be honor and chivalry. We will be proud of that, whatever comes of the game."

Although it was rarer for Dr. Evans to be specific of his own athletic career in his speeches and writings, in a 1935 edition of his "Chapel Talk" addresses to the college community, he described "a very much lower standard of ethics in my day than at present in many ways… Oshkosh would take on some strong factory men because they had taken a few days work at the Normal [campus building]. Both Beloit and Ripon played their coaches. One year Lawrence refused to play without having three or four of their town men on the team. We compromised by taking three of our town men on."

He highlighted a few memorable scores from his career. "In 1895, Fond Du Lac Athletics 0, Ripon College 52. The College Days commented on the game: 'Absence of slugging and quarreling very noticeable to the spectators'... Another score in the same year: Beloit 81, Ripon 0. In this game there was a protest of 15 minute duration, Beloit complaining to the officials. This gave us all a needed rest."

There was also a Thanksgiving game against Oshkosh, "at which we were overfed, and the game was called immediately after the dinner" and the game at Fond Du Lac "in which there were two jail birds on the team".

He explained not only the intercollegiate oddities and experiences he faced, but the challenges Ripon's own environment presented at the time. He described a lack of institutional support, with athletics maintained by its competitors alone.

"The faculty were very unsympathetic. The Athletic Association was entirely a student affair. We paid for our own suits; bought our own shoes. I paid $10 on the deficit of the Association one year, which came pretty hard when I worked for 10 [cents] a day… We played baseball with no coaches."

There is something both alien and universal to what Dr. Evans describes. The idea of the community members suiting up for a college they do not attend seems bizarre, and yet seems less distant than professional league draftees returning to college athletics in the NIL era. A lack of fights coming as a disappointment to spectators echoes plainly in an environment showcased and influenced by social media. Institutional support for sports still varies wildly, and administration unsympathetic to student athletes is no stretch of the imagination for many colleges.

There is a yet greater empathetic cord struck by Dr. Silas, as he goes into detail on what sports felt like. He spoke of his fear before every football game, especially against Lake Forest, the stress and pressure of performance. He spoke of his pride after a special play of his drew newspaper attention, of seeing his name in the headlines. He described his ambitions to be a pole vaulter, unfulfilled despite incessant practicing as he could not get above the eight foot mark, the failure sitting forefront in his mind despite holding school track records. 

His experience as an athlete formed his context for his future leadership, in much the same way as sports do for any such athlete. The triumphs, the challenges, the internal doubt, the successes, the failures and the pride all form and influence the "most illustrious son" moniker he not only earned, but found himself attempting to live up to. In his presidency, the challenges of college athletics would rear its head expectantly, demanding decisions be made amid a shifting landscape, echoing and foreshadowing the conflicts still present in our environment. 

"Now, my dear President Evans," writes Milton College President William Daland, "I beg to register with you a most decided protest against the practice of seeking to induce students in one college to leave that college and go to another for the sake of athletics; also against the practice of seeking to induce graduates of a high school in a town where there is a college worthy of the name to leave that place and attend another college."

The letter came as a response to an attempt from Ripon's staff to recruit a baseball player local to Milton. While Dr. Evans responds to President Daland with clear agreement on the issues of attempting to induce transfers, as well as admonishing the party responsible, the topic persisted in college athletics throughout his career. In a 1927 letter to then-Lawrence president Henry Wriston discussing the growing threat of students being enticed to transfer, Dr. Evans writes "We have the same thing over here repeatedly. They tell us that they are offered even grades, to say nothing about jobs and expenses, to go to other schools." [Original emphasis included.]

It was the rumor of reciprocal grades most drawing Dr. Evans's ire. To sacrifice education for sport, to exchange earned knowledge for the appearance of such in service of athletics, was unfathomable in his mind, so much so he openly doubted the veracity of the offers his students told him they received. 

It is interesting, then, to consider what appeared to be Dr. Evans's stance on the other burning question of college sports: schools profiting off their athletes. The 1929 football season saw Ripon take on, in succession, the teams of Wisconsin, Chicago, and Minnesota, drawing opposition from famed Milwaukee sportswriter Manning Vaughan. 

"Gold digging in collegiate sports seems to be quite the fashion, but the boys up at Ripon appear to be carrying their commercialism far too far…" he wrote in the Milwaukee Sentinel, "Those who never get too squeamish about the ethics of football may try to defend the schedule by telling us that Ripon received substantial guarantees from Wisconsin, Chicago, and Minnesota. What if it did? Are football players, even with their exaggerated notions of school loyalty, supposed to go out of their class and risk their limbs and necks merely for the sake of maintaining a high priced coaching staff?"

The article would not influence Ripon's scheduling the next season, where the team took on Chicago, Marquette, and Wisconsin's reserve team. Only after the 1931 season, which concluded with a 100-0 loss to Michigan State, would Ripon begin to limit their large-school opposition, perhaps due to the attention garnered by such a margin. 

It is possible the money was a deciding factor in the schedule for Dr. Evans. Earlier in the 1920's, Ripon's financial strife had become a threat to the school's operation, with an endowment too low to draw additional government funding. Letters between Dr. Evans, President Wriston, and Wriston's predecessor allude to flying rumors of financial struggles, debates over how dire the situation needed to be considered, and even introduces proposals of a Ripon-Lawrence partnership, sharing resources of all kinds to ensure mutual survival. 

With every dollar being counted, it is possible Dr. Evans saw the guarantees mentioned by Vaughan as a necessity, offering financial certainty for athletics in uncertain times, ensuring the self-funded experience of Dr. Evans's era would not return. However, a speech to Ripon's football team before a train ride to Lawrence suggests another motivation for the scheduling. 

"Football is a representative activity," Dr. Evans says. "Show Ripon at her best on this trip… Win the esteem of Appleton and of the state, by a wholesome good time and a courteous and sportmanlike conduct."

For Dr. Evans, the representative nature of football carried a capacity for influence, an idea that the display of sportsmanship and ethics he so valued could sway the opinion of the spectators, specifically against what he saw as the worst attribute one could carry. 

"Don't be hypocrites. I mean just that. The hypocrisy of the college student often takes the form of trying to make themselves out to be worse than they really are. You are a good set we believe, and show it."

As a pastor and as a guest lecturer, Dr. Evans would deliver sermons specifically formed around the topic of hypocrisy throughout his life. He denounced it in all aspects of life, religion, athletics, and conduct; to purport to be what you are not, to Dr. Evans, was the greatest affront anyone could display.

So then, with football as a representation of Ripon College, and by extension, its student body, the act of playing the largest schools in front of the largest available audiences becomes an act of defiance against the plague of hypocrisy Dr. Evans so hated. The student athlete no longer announced a desire to compete, struggle and win against any obstacle, but played a schedule only of opponents they knew they could beat. The Ripon teams of the time would not carry on arrogantly or spitefully, acting to the emotional stereotypes expected by some when two teams face off, but instead show their opponents and the overall community what Dr. Evans considered to be the student athlete of a new era: respectful, competitive, and willingly facing the toughest of obstacles.

There is a great focus on the unprecedented nature of our time. The challenges of higher education, and the role of athletics in the college environment, sits under a scrutiny looming more and more as an existential threat. Despite this, and despite every way the student-athlete experience differs from Dr. Evans's time, there are clear connections of achievement, challenge, self-discovery, representation and competition extending back far before he stepped on the field, to long after his reign at Ripon came to an end. In an address to Ripon staff outlining what he believed to be the most crucial elements to the college's continued and future success, sports garnered specific attention.

"Athletics are much in the public eye. We cordially endorse athletics as a part of the education of the whole man. In fact, students have actually achieved in athletics in ways never recorded in the sporting columns… [Our coach] is employed the year round and will more and more minister to the whole student body. His is the gospel of strengthening weak stomachs and raising fallen shoulders."

Finally, in an address focused on post-war college in the United States, he set athletics upon an even higher pedestal.

"Great nations play games… Civilization means to play the game according to the rules of the game. Athletics and physical culture should not be a disturbing invasion in our public school system, but it should be an integral part of that system."

Dr. Evans believed wholeheartedly in what he continually demonstrated and encouraged: an ideal of athletics and education not only coexisting, but purposefully intertwined, developing the college student as a whole person, ready for the next stage of life. It is from this belief, formed and fostered by Dr. Silas's own unprecedented times, that a path through and forward is illuminated: athletics and education, not in competition but in combination, following the example set by Ripon's most illustrious son. It is in Dr. Evans's directive to the Ripon College of his time that we can see the directive for ours:

"[Show] a real loyalty. Not a claptrap of victory bells and shouts, though we prize that too, but a consciousness of kindness, and a kindness therefore in our common consciousness. Loyalty is ever this, the seeing of the best in our college, believing in it, and helping to make it so by our faith and our works."