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High school coaches are important people in many USA high schools and especially in rural areas in the South where the paddle has been or remains popular.
Coaches are often the main administrators of the paddle with the school’s athletes often the main beneficiaries. This raises the question as to whether sports coaches might have introduced the paddle into US high schools, or popularized its use there. If so, when and why did this happen? A small number of influential and successful coaches might have been involved. Once the practice was established it would likely continue through the generations of players and coaches.
Two states are of particular interest, namely football-mad Texas and paddle-mad Mississippi.
https://www.corpun.com/counuss.htm
“Mississippi is the “world capital of paddling” in both percentage and absolute terms, having pulled ahead of Texas, which not long ago had the largest number of students spanked — though not a high percentage figure; this is simply because Texas, with some 5 million school students, is so big.”
School districts vary greatly in Texas. Only the smaller conservative rural school districts continue to paddle.
Football (gridiron), basketball and baseball are the three most important sports played by high schools in the USA.
When considering popularity, a distinction needs to be made between spectator and commercial interest on one hand and student participation levels on the other. The former puts extra pressure on coaches to achieve success while the later affects the numbers who might be exposed to paddling.
American football, especially at the college and high school level, is by far the most popular spectator team sport in most areas of the Southern United States and especially Texas. I have not yet found reliable information for the high schools in Mississippi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_in … n_football
There may have been more than one mechanism or factor responsible for the adoption of the paddle in schools in preference to other implements.
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https://www.britannica.com/sports/basketball
The only major sport strictly of U.S. origin, basketball was invented by James Naismith in 1891, at the International Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Training School (now Springfield College), Springfield, Massachusetts, where Naismith was an instructor in physical education.
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https://www.britannica.com/sports/baseball
The United States is credited with developing several popular sports, including some (such as baseball, gridiron football, and basketball) that have large fan bases and, to varying degrees, have been adopted internationally. But baseball, despite the spread of the game throughout the globe and the growing influence of Asian and Latin American leagues and players, is the sport that Americans still recognize as their “national pastime.” The game has long been woven into the fabric of American life and identity. “It’s our game,” exclaimed the poet Walt Whitman more than a century ago, “that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game.” He went on to explain that baseball “has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere—it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life. It is the place where memory gathers.”
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When I referred to some schools as “paddle happy” as opposed to “paddle-mad” I was asked why not call them suspension averse?
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When I referred to some schools as “paddle happy” as opposed to “paddle-mad” I was asked why not call them suspension averse?
An excellent point! It is so very easy to fall into use “anti” terminology. Clearly, those who use the paddle believe they are doing good. And they may well be – if the paddled agree. Accepting one’s punishment as fair and appropriate, whatever its nature, does a great deal to negate any negative and accentuate the positive effects. Any football player, except perhaps the pansy round ball type, who can not take a deserved paddling is unlikely to be up to the rigours of the game, including: workouts to exhaustion, gang showers, concussion, quadri- and paraplegia, cheer leaders, fast food, etc.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/ … ive-values
Aaron Timms in the British daily newspaper the Guardian of Wed 25 Jul 201 describes the social conservatism that has defined American football coaches for decades:
[. . .]
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the enemies of football were civil rights, the campus protest movement, anti-war activism, beards, long hair, and other offenses against grooming. In August 1969 Sports Illustrated devoted a cover story to the plight of “the desperate coach,” adrift in a world unmoored from its old verities and tasked suddenly with managing a generation of hirsute, anti-authoritarian “free thinkers”. There was, judging by the evidence, no struggle to get coaches to go on the record.
Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry lamented in the late 1960s that without football, “society would lose on the great strongholds – paying the price. There’s not much discipline left in this country.”
Around the same time University of Southern California assistant coach Marv Goux, surveying the alarming growth of his charges’ hair, groused: “The bums eat the food our society produces, they wear the clothes our society produces and now they want to destroy our society. Like pigs, they have no pride or discipline.”
Challenged in the early 1970s by a black power supporter over why he did not allow his players to participate in demonstrations, Southern University’s Al Taber replied, “Because I believe in America too strongly.”
[. . .]
Attitudes such as those described above suggest insecurity and uncertainty possibly heightened by job insecurity if teams failed to win.
Coaching, hazing and other practices may have been student-lead emulations of college (university) and fraternity customs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o … ted_States
Excerpt
[. . .]
Secondary schools
In 1880, American high schools were primarily considered to be preparatory academies for students who were going to attend college. But by 1910 they had been transformed into core elements of the common school system and had broader goals of preparing many students for work after high school. The explosive growth brought the number of students from 200,000 in 1890 to 1,000,000 in 1910, to almost 2,000,000 by 1920; 7% of youths aged 14 to 17 were enrolled in 1890, rising to 32% in 1920. The graduates found jobs especially in the rapidly growing white-collar sector. Cities large and small across the country raced to build new high schools. Few were built in rural areas, so ambitious parents moved close to town to enable their teenagers to attend high school. After 1910, vocational education was added, as a mechanism to train the technicians and skilled workers needed by the booming industrial sector.
In the 1880s the high schools started developing as community centers. They added sports and by the 1920s were building gymnasiums that attracted large local crowds to basketball and other games, especially in small town schools that served nearby rural areas.
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Pruter, Robert (2013). The Rise of American High School Sports and the Search for Control, 1880–1930. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. ISBN 978-0-8156-3314-3.
https://books.google.com/books?id=tIWiAgAAQBAJ
Publisher’s Description: Nearly half of all American high school students participate on sports teams. With a total of 7.6 million participants, this makes the high school sports program in America the largest organized sports program in the world. Robert Pruter’s work traces the history of high school sports in America from the student-led athletic clubs of the 1880’s through to the government takeover of athletic associations in the 1930s. In doing so, he provides an exploration of the ways in which the ideals Americans hoped to instill in future generations-hard work, fair play, team building-were challenged by questions of gender, race, and religion. Pruter explains the struggle to control high school sports, first by schools and local government and eventually on the national level. “Interscholastic sports have become so important that they have become a touchstone of conflict over … virtually every social division (in) our society,” Pruter writes. “The values and ethics in our society as a whole are reflected in our schools, and most publicly on the athletic fields and courts.”
According to a 1905 survey by questionaire (357 replies to 881 questionaires sent out with only 8 Southern schools responding), high school coaching was in early stages of development in 1905. In many schools there were no coaches, in some schools there were graduate coaches (recent student graduates would come to coach the team), and in some schools there were “professional” coaches, meaning either they were hired by the students or the school or they were a part of the paid faculty.
THE REGULATION AND CONTROL OF COMPETITIVE SPORT IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS OF THE UNITED STATES
G. S. Lowman, Athletic Instructor, Brookline High School, Mass.
American Physical Education Review. v.12, pages 241-255, 1907.
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.3192406 … %3Bseq=247
On October 20, 2010 in post #15 of this thread I recorded some early mentions of the American spanking paddle as recorded in the following authoritative dictionary:
A dictionary of American English on historic principles. Compiled at the University of Chicago under the editorship of W A Craigie & J R Hulbert. Oxford University Press (1942).
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.4901500 … %3Bseq=419
This dictionary was intended to pick up where the Oxford English Dictionary left off. It covers American English words and phrases in use from the first English settlements up to the start of the 20th century.
Paddle (verb)
3. To beat or spank (a person) with, or as with, a paddle.
1856. Olmsted, Slave States, 189. I thought it was nothing but damned sulkiness, so I paddled him, and made him go to work.
1904. Hartford Courant, 23 June 8. A secret society of girls ‘initiated’ some neophytes by blindfolding them … paddling them, and then rolling them down a steep hill.
1907. Springfield Republican [newspaper, Massachusetts] August 18, 1907 [corrected date]
[In an article entitled “A Yankee schoolma’am in Texas. Amiable studies of things very different from home.“]
“I’ll paddle you!” is the threat used by despairing mothers and teachers (in Texas) in case of necessary discipline; and sure enough they do, with a regular wooden paddle constructed for the purpose.
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The last entry above indicates that the paddle was in use in at least some Texas homes and schools in 1907, a fact that a Yankee school ma’am and a newspaper editor though noteworthy. I do not have access to the newspaper archive which is available here: http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives/
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I cannot get this newspaper (Hartford Courant) fee free. Do you know how I can?
Much obliged,
American Way
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At Milton, Pa., Monday afternoon, a secret society of girls “initiated” some neophytes by blindfolding them, pushing them into a briar bush, paddling them, and then rolling them down a steep hill.
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I’ve read of US parents using paddles too in the past. Is this a thing of the past now? Very few UK parents use family CP nowadays. It is not illegal here but parents may only use their hand and it must not leave any marks except a little redness that fades quickly.