experimental games with the twelve-foot baskets to see the tall fellows who had been in the habit of camping under baskets, using their height to steal the ball, and then socking it in. They lost their toy with the tall baskets. If the backboards are moved in six feet from the end lines I am sure there will be less out-of-bounds plays, which at best are slow and of little interest. And I can see no outstanding argument against this change. For a long time there has been a feeling that something ought to be done in regard to free throws. If a team has advanced the ball the full length of the floor only to be stopped by the whistle of the referee fouling one of their players, there is a slow parade of officials and players the full length of the floor. It doesn’t look good, and there is a growing feeling that a team is penalized too much under the present rules. Remotely it is like penalizing a football team the length of the field, and more nearly like the golf penalty of loss of stroke and distance. Whether there is merit in the proposal of allowing free throws to be made by the offended team in the half of the court where the foul is made only time and experiment can tell. The six-foot circles mentioned would be a handy method of restraining players from crowding in close to jumpers on a held ball, which has sometimes been a bad feature. | Last spring, at the end of our practice period, we staged at Lawrence an experimental game, incorporating all of the changes I have mentioned. The twelve-foot baskets were moved six feet in from the end lines. Field goals counted three points and the foul throws one point. Offended players shot for the basket in the half of the court where the foul was committed. Jump-ball circles were chalked on the floor. CHECKING UP ON A CLINICAL GAME LINED up my varsity against the freshman team in a regulation length game, with two competent officials and a crowd of almost a thousand persons, including visiting coaches and sports writers from near-by papers. I had an expert, with a chart of the court before him, mark the spot from which field goals were attempted, and if the shot was good he drew a circle around the player’s number. There were blank spaces on the chart for out-of-bounds plays, for free throws, jump balls, fouls and so forth. The varsity was a bit too good for the frosh, winning 46 to 38. The winners took a total of eighty-one shots at the basket, connecting for fourteen of them. The losers COUNTRY GENTLEMAN shot sixty-three times and scored eleven field goals. In fairness to the players I want to say they had had little or no experience with the high hoops and it wasn’t strange that they would have some trouble adjusting their sights. The varsity made good four free throws out of ten at- tempts; the losers scored five free throws on eight at- tempts. And there is a significant point—only eighteen fouls were called in the game, less than two to a man on the average. This is considerable under our average in Conference games. The referee’s whistle, cutting in only at long intervals, gave a marked impression of speed and continuous action to the game. I have before me the chart showing the spots from which goals were shot. I find that only seven were scored from points closer than the free-throw line—seven out of twenty-four. Not one was made from directly under the basket. The rest of the goals were not holy ghosters from way out on the court; mostly they were tossed from a distance approximating the foul line or slightly greater, all of them beautiful, high arching shots that always thrill a spectator. Strangely, perhaps, players were more successful shooting from the sides, fairly well out. Another significant fact was that in the second half, after the teams got the feel of the court, the ball went out of bounds at the ends only five times. Consequently our clinical game was not stopped every minute or so with the dragging out-of-bounds play. As is readily seen, the new scoring had no effect on the outcome of the game. Counting two points for field goals and one point for free throws the scoring would be 32-27 Varsity; for comparison I repeat the score as we recorded it—46-38. Dr. James A. Naismith, with whom I have been asso- ciated here at Kansas for many years, and who so ably designed the game in 1891, was a spectator at this game and gave his approval to the proposed changes. He told me that his original intention was not to put any premium on the tall player, and that he heartily approves of taking away from such players any undue advantage. A good friend of mine, who coaches a high school team, came to me after this experimental game with a worried look on his face. He said: “‘ Don’t give us this twelve-foot basket now, Phog. Our ceilings are too low and it would cripple our game.”’ And I assured him that I didn’t want to see the high school baskets changed. There is no reason why they should be changed. What might be evils in college ball are not necessarily evils in high school. I pointed out to him that high school boys use a twelve- pound shot, shifting to a sixteen pounder when they get 19 to college, and in recent years high school athletic authori- ties in several states have cut the height of the high hurdles several inches. It has seemed to me that many high school boys have been jumping the high sticks and not hurdling. Some seniors in high school may be able to use the high hurdles correctly, but most of the underclass boys can’t. So I say, leave the high school baskets at ten feet. More than that, I favor an eight-foot basket for grade school games and possibly a nine-foot one for junior highs. This year I am starting on my twenty-eighth year as a basketball coach, and I can recall my baptism into the teaching of this sport. I was a student at Kansas, playing on the basketball team, and since we had no paid coach I did what teaching I could. One day I came into the gym- nasium to find Doctor Naismith laughing heartily over a letter he had in his hand. BEATING THE WORLD CHAMPIONS = ERE’S a good one,” he said. “‘ This letter asks if you would be willing to go down to Baker as basketball coach.” He stressed the word coach. Baker University is at Baldwin, sixteen miles from Lawrence. I didn’t see what was funny about it, and he explained: “You can’t coach a game like basketball. You just play it.” “Well,” I argued, “‘you can teach them to shoot free throws and something about handling the ball. You can teach them to pass at angles and run in curves. You can show them how to arch their shots and how to pivot to- ward the sidelines instead of into the court where a guard can get at the ball.” I don’t think I changed Doctor Naismith’s ideas on the point. Just before coming to the University I had played guard for the Kansas City Athletic Club team for two sea- sons. In that day the great name in basketball was the Buffalo Germans, a Y. M. C. A. team that had defended its title of World Champions at the Pan American Exposi- tion and later at the 1904 Olympic Games, defeating all comers. The team had then toured the country, winning something like 250 games and losing eight. They came to Kansas City and we met them in a three-game series at Convention Hall. One of my prized mementos is an account of that series, written by a rising young newspaper man named George Creel, who was defeated last fall for the nomination for governor of California by Upton Sinclair. Full of exultant (Continued on Page 73) A jam-up under the basket as Chicago and Ohio State teams tangle in an important Big Ten Conference game.