The History of Exeter Football and Soccer

PEA and America love football. The hard hits, fantasy football and Super Bowl parties have made it America’s favorite pastime. Exeter played a notable role in developing the sport, when, in 1878, Exeter and Andover faced off in our country’s oldest prep school football rivalry. However, for almost a hundred years before tackle football became dominant at Exeter, the popular fall sport was a different type of football, what we today call soccer.

"The early games were pretty loose affairs ... Those who sat on the north of the main aisle of the Latin room opposed those who sat on the south, and every agile and rugged boy was expected to take part. The game was purely a kicking contest; no carrying of the ball was allowed.”

Laurence Crosbie tells the story in his 1924 The Phillips Exeter Academy, A History: Chapter XIX, Football: The Game of Games (pages 218 ff).

“Until 1877 only association football [soccer’s previous name] was known at Exeter, played with the well-known round ball. In the fall of that year the first oval Rugby footballs appeared. They were bought merely as a curiosity. The modern game had not yet come in. … That fall, however, there came a challenge from Andover for a match at Rugby, which Exeter was obliged to decline since it had no Rugby team. In the fall of 1878, Exeter accepted a challenge from Andover, and on November 2 journeyed about eighty strong to the school on a hill for the first football game.”

Crosbie quotes Alpheus Packard, a student in 1811, on fall football’s earliest incarnation at Exeter: “The early games were pretty loose affairs ... Those who sat on the north of the main aisle of the Latin room opposed those who sat on the south, and every agile and rugged boy was expected to take part. The game was purely a kicking contest; no carrying of the ball was allowed.”

In 1832, Edward Daveis’ reported: “[Association] Football was our great game, and was keenly exciting to the boys…It was held dishonorable for the players to use their hands, but we could butt with our shoulders…I remember I used to count the black and blue spots inflicted on my shins during the games with great pride.”

Crosbie suggests that the Town of Exeter’s founders brought association football to Exeter from Cambridge University in England in the seventeenth century.

“Perhaps Exeter has inherited a fondness for football that goes back to the early days of John Wheelwright, the founder of our town [in 1639]. He and Oliver Cromwell [a famous British military commander] were college mates at Sidney College, Cambridge, England. Of him Cromwell remarked ‘that he was more afraid of meeting Wheelwright at football than he had been since of meeting an army in the field, for he was infallibly sure of being tripped up by him.’”

For most of the first century after PEA’s birth in 1781, association football was our preferred fall sport. Today we are lucky to play both forms of football.