An Advocate of Athletics and Baseball

Frederick Gunn was an early proponent of athletics and physical exercise as an essential component of a successful educational curriculum and character development.

• Every Gunnery scholar had to belong to a baseball “nine,” as the teams were called.
• Students played an early form of hockey, called “shinney,” and a form of football that more closely resembled rugby.
• Mr. Gunn particularly enjoyed baseball and Clarence Deming, Class of 1866, who went on to become a sportswriter of some note, reflected on his athletic ability in “The Master of The Gunnery,” writing: “He played thrower and catcher with equal facility, and he was famous for the unerring precision with which at long distances he hit the base-runner.”
• Gunn Scholar Mark Rhoads ’04 brought to light how important baseball was to The Gunnery through his research on the first photograph of a baseball game in progress, now held in the Paula and George Krimsky ’60 Archives and Special Collections. Mr. Gunn appears in the photograph (below), which was taken on August 4, 1869, during the first Gunnery alumni reunion and was featured as the frontispiece of Ken Burns' book on baseball.
• The first team of nine was established even earlier, in the 1850s. They played on the village green.
• Also playing for Gunnery in that “grand” match in 1869: John Brinsmade, an alumnus who was at that time in college but would later marry Fred and Abigail’s daughter, and become the school’s second headmaster. Writing in the Stray Shot in June 1908, Brinsmade said: “Baseball, the national game, was played here as early as in any place, outside of a few large cities … The Gunnery was playing the national game with out-of-town clubs before Yale and Harvard had begun their matches.”

Future headmaster William Hamilton Gibson, bottom right, played baseball for Gunnery in 1899.