Sport: Yale Swimmers

At Springfield, Mass, last week the Yale swimming team won its 13 2nd consecutive dual meet, against Springfield College, 61 points to 16. Two nights later the team stretched its string to 133, against College of the City of New York. In New York, Yale swimmers were first in every event, second in four. In the 440-yd. swim, Norris Hoyt of Yale set a pool record.

That Yale swimmers have won 16 out of the last 17 Intercollegiate Swimming Association championships, have been invincible in dual meets for the past ten years, is due largely to their coach. In 1914, Robert J. H. Kiphuth went to Yale as an instructor in physical education. Three years later, he was put in charge of the Carnegie Pool, where he taught himself to coach swimmers by watching them swim. He promptly adopted a radical method to improve the physical condition of his squad: gymnasium exercises, which most coaches then thought made swimmers musclebound. Stocky, shock-haired, absorbed in his vocation, Bob Kiphuth found himself recognized as the ablest U. S. swimming coach when he was chosen to train the 1928 U. S. Olympic team. In 1932, functioning in the same capacity, he was libeled by Cartoonist Robert ("Believe It or Not") Ripley who magnified the fact that Kiphuth was never on a swimming team into the statement that he could not swim at all. Last week, Coach Kiphuth was again made the victim of journalistic skullduggery. Yale lost the National Collegiate Swimming championships (no dual meet) to Michigan last year. Michigan, winners of last year's National Collegiate Swimming championships (no dual meet), has tried to arrange a dual meet with Yale this season, without success. Last week, an Ann Arbor sportswriter parodied a series of letters between Michigan's Coach Matt Mann and Yale's Kiphuth. Samples:

Mann: Why be a piker? Let's ... see who's champion of the United States?

Kiphuth: No can do, sorry. A winning coach always eats.