ABSTRACT
1926 was a banner year in Hampton, Iowaat least where school athletics was concerned. That season, Hampton's prized girls' high school basketball team played its way to the state championship, winning the first-ever state title bestowed by the Iowa High School Girls' Athletic Union. By the 1920s, teams such as the Hampton High squad had made organized, competitive sports an integral part of growing up in the United States. From the playgrounds of the nation's largest cities to the fields of its most rural communities, a plethora of athletic programs introduced young people to rules, coaching, teamwork, sportsmanship, the sting of defeat, and the pleasures of victory. An interest in using sports to mold young people into useful citizens sprang from the social shifts of the mid-nineteenth century, as the United States became a more urban, industrial society, and the circumstances of childhood changed drastically.
