Sewanee: The University of The South - Athletics

Athletics

The Sewanee Tigers were pioneers in American intercollegiate athletics and possessed the South's preeminent football program in the 1890s. Their 1899 football team had perhaps the best season in college football history, winning all 12 of their games, 11 by shutout, and outscoring their opponents 322-10. Five of those wins, all shutouts, came in a six-day period while on a 2,500-mile (4,000 km) trip by train. Ten of their twelve opponents, including all five of their road trip victims, remain major college football powers to this day.

Sewanee was a charter member of the Southeastern Conference upon its formation in 1932, but by this time its athletic program had declined precipitously and Sewanee never won a conference football game in the eight years it was an SEC member. The Tigers were shut out 26 times in their 37 SEC games, and were outscored by a combined total of 1163–84.

When vice chancellor Benjamin Ficklin Finney, who had reportedly objected to Sewanee joining the SEC, left his position in 1938, the leading candidate was Alexander Guerry, a former president of the University of Chattanooga. According to a university historian, Guerry agreed to come to Sewanee only if the school stopped awarding athletic scholarships. In 1940, two years after Guerry's arrival, Sewanee withdrew from the SEC and subsequently deemphasized varsity athletics. Guerry's stance is sometimes credited as an early step toward the 1973 creation of NCAA Division III, which prohibits athletic scholarships.

Sewanee went on to become a charter member of the College Athletic Conference in 1962. The conference, now the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC), consists of small, academically-focused private schools such as Sewanee. Illustrating this focus, as of 2009, 27 Sewanee student-athletes had received the prestigious NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship for academic excellence since the program's inception in 1964.

Sewanee is now a member of the Southern Athletic Association (SAA), offering 11 varsity sports for men and 13 for women. As with the SEC and SCAC, Sewanee is a charter member of its current conference—it was one of the seven SCAC members that announced their departure from that conference at the 2011 annual meeting of SCAC presidents. The seven were joined by Berry College, another small private school in Georgia.