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Code of Honour
The two most popular sports at Mount Allison before the turn of the century were cricket and rugby football. Team sports such as these, which were imported from Britain, were as much about socializing among peers as they were about competing fairly. They were also played exclusively by men. On describing a cricket match between the Sackville and Moncton town teams, the local newspaper, The Borderer and the Westmorland and Cumberland Advertiser (2 September 1869), reported:
"The Moncton Club bore their defeat like genuine cricketers -- gallantly, manfully.”
The importance of competing fairly was also felt by Frank Parker Day, who scored Mount Allison’s first intercollegiate rugby football points on the new University Athletic Field on 3 November 1900. He reflected on his play 49 years later:
"I was pushing hard on the tail of the scrum and had my feet in a very awkward position; suddenly I saw the ball just in front of my left toe; it was impossible for me to heel the ball back, so I picked it up, ran round the right side of the scrum and scored."
Day noted, however, that picking the ball out of the scrimmage was not allowed under the rules used at that time:
"A thousand times through life I have wished that I had not picked that ball out of the scrum. For we learn as we drift along through life that nothing has any real and lasting value unless we win it fairly and honestly."
Mount Allison [Academy?] cricket team, 1886
Rugby football players Harold Eugene Bigelow (bottom) and Frank Parker Day (top), ca. 1902
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