Ninety years ago this May,
The Bates Student reported on an intercollegiate athletic competition for Bates women: an archery tournament vs. “unseen opponents….from many colleges and universities of the United States.”
The opponents were “unseen” because they didn’t travel to the Bates campus to compete, nor did Bates archers travel to theirs.
Instead, the 1931 Bates women’s archery team participated in a “telegraphic” tournament, where teams shot their bows on their own campuses, tallied the points, and telegraphed, as in dot-dot-dash Morse code traveling through wires, their scores to an offsite host for tallying.
This brief film clip shoes Bates archers on the old Rand Field in the 1930s. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)