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Champions three years running, the 1930 basketball team holds the faculty loving cup (below) that was retired in their honor.
Tye Played Like Girls
he  history of organized sports at East Carolina dates to 1912 when several women students met to form the Athletic Association and organize intramural events for basketball, tennis and cross-country walking. At the time the sum total of campus sports facilities consisted of 10 outdoor tennis courts, two outdoor basketball courts and plenty of dirt roads for walking. There were no coaches or phys ed teachers on staff, so the students had to do everything themselves.
“The greatest need…is not so much a gymnasium as a physical instructor, who can devote her whole time to the work and use the outdoor gymnasium at hand,” the association pleaded in the winter 1914 issue of the Training School Quarterly (TSQ).
The students organized the association into two divisions, the Athenians and the Olympians. Each division fielded basketball, softball and tennis teams. Soon, there were 10 intramural basketball teams and tennis was played so often that it was hard to find an open court in the afternoon.
A basketball tournament on Thanksgiving Day 1914 was so successful that the administration decided to make it an annual event, along with another one in January and a major Field Day tournament in May. “During the entire year sustained interest has been shown in basketball and a number of match games have been played,” the TSQ reported. “Thanksgiving Day was the climax of the fall athletics” when the seniors beat the juniors, 10-2. Recapping that game, the TSQ said the seniors exhibited “level heads, beautiful team work, zeal and determination.”
At the first Field Day basketball tournament, the juniors avenged their Thanksgiving loss to the seniors. The faculty awarded a loving cup to the juniors, a practice that continued annually until the cup was retired when the Class of 1930 team won it three years in a row.
Volleyball was added to the women’s sports program in 1916, and archery soon afterwards. All athletics were suspended in the fall of 1918 due to the war effort and later by the influenza epidemic. Athletics resumed the next fall. By 1931, male enrollment was great enough to compete in intercollegiate games, but the women continued to play on an intramural-only basis well into the 1950s.
For nearly 40 years the Athletic Association and the campus YWCA—along with the Poe and Lanier literary societies—dominated student life. The Y took charge of religious services and ran the student store. The Athletic Association, which was considered the fun bunch, managed all the sports, staged a formal dance and took its members on an expense-paid weekend trip to Atlantic Beach.
WWWS received news feeds from the International Goodwill Network, aired classical music from the French Broadcasting Network and carried educational programming from the United Nations. Members of the music faculty performed live and English professors read classical texts. Many marveled that WWWS could pump out static-free news and Perry Como records to listeners within a 50-mile radius.
In an era when most radio stations went off the air at dusk, WWWS was jumping until 9:30 p.m. because, as everyone knows, college students stay up late.
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It was during those evening hours when Bach gave way to Elvis and the station attracted its widest audience. For an hour, students could call in, request a song and dedicate it to someone special.
From broadcast studios in Joyner Library, WWWS ran telephone lines into Wright Auditorium, the gym and the baseball and football stadiums, and the phrase “live remote broadcast” became a new buzzword around campus.
Almost seven years to the day after it first went on-air, WWWS fell silent on March 30, 1964, when a storm blew its broadcast tower off the library roof.
The campus was without a student radio station until WZMB went on the air in February 1982, still broadcasting over 91.3.
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We are the Y
The YWCA becomes the first student group on campus when it forms in the fall of 1909; it serves as the student government until a formal SGA starts in 1920; it opens the first student store in 1922. The Teco Echo says the new Y store is “doing a good business, catching the sandwich and ice cream trade that has been going elsewhere.” Profits from the student store pay for construction of the Y Hut in 1925, which serves as the student center until it’s razed in 1952 to make way for Joyner Library. |
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Men secede from SGA
Since its creation in 1920 all Student Self-Governing Association officers have been women, which rankles the 100 or so male students. Outnumbered 10–1, it’s the men who are called coeds. Most bothersome to the men is that it’s the all-female SSGA that sets residence hall rules, even for the men’s dorms. To address this, in 1932 a coed representative is added to the Student Council. But the men continue to feel underrepresented, and in 1934 they split entirely from the SSGA to form the Men’s Student Self-Government Association, the MSSGA. The separate SGAs co exist for nine years until a referendum in April 1943 produces a merger. |
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Sororities go national
Guests from as far away as New York, Florida and the West Coast arrive the weekend of Feb. 5–6, 1960, to deliver charters to the eight sorority colonies that have operated on campus for two years. The colonies become chapters of Alpha Delta Pi, Alpha Omricon Pi, Alpha Pi, Alpha Xi Delta, Chi Omega (first pledge class at left), Delta Zeta, Kappa Delta and Sigma Sigma Sigma. The sororities stage their first Rush Week the following weekend and many are disappointed when only 41 women, about half of those rushing, actually pledge. The small turnout is attributed to the 3.0 GPA requirement. A second rush is held in the spring which is more successful. The original eight sororities remain active today. A ninth, Zeta Tau Alpha, was chartered in 1987.
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Chitwood arrives at ECU
After completing training in cardiothoracic surgery at Duke University, Dr. W. Randolph Chitwood Jr. comes to Greenville in 1984 to start the heart surgery program at East Carolina and its teaching hospital, Pitt County Memorial Hospital. Later that year he performs the first coronary artery bypass surgery at PCMH and in 1987 he performs the first heart transplant there. Chitwood performs the first totally robotic endoscopic mitral valve repair in North America and the second in the world. The Cardiovascular Center at Pitt County Memorial Hospital, directed by Chitwood, performs 1,200 cardiac surgical, 3,000 interventional, and 5,000 catheter-based procedures every year.
Images courtesy University Archives
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