Early years of sports in Dripping Springs

Last week, we explored the history of the education system in Dripping Springs.

These changes affected how sports were to be played in the area. Even though the public education bill was passed in 1876, no provision was made for making attendance compulsory. Therefore, attendance was voluntary. This would remain the case until 1916.

This certainly made having any regular sports teams difficult from year to year. It also explained why some schools had difficulty keeping their enrollment up.

Baseball had been invented by the second half of the 1800s and was the favorite sport of most communities at the time. However, in those days, school terms were usually from October to March, lessening the amount of time available to play games between schools. As a result, most games were played in the summer and made up of outsiders.

There was one particular team from Dripping Springs formed by A.L. Davis, Jr. called Dripping Springs Picked Nine. They were prominent until the turn of the century. They would play many of the community teams around and even catch the train at Kyle and go to San Antonio for games. Games were always the centerpiece of local events, and when the games were to begin, everything else pretty well ceased. As the school years were extended, there were more and more school games. Dripping Springs dropped baseball in 1938 when Allen Stephenson died as the result of an accident and did not pick it back up until the early 1950s.

The available sports were becoming numerous as the new century arrived. Baseball, basketball, track, tennis and volleyball were among those gaining favor. Unfortunately, there was a lack of newspapers chronicling the happenings in and around Dripping Springs until about 1920, so little is known of school life in sports around that time.

We do know the school had to drop its three high school grades by 1910 due to lack of attendance. Travis Garnett had collected a picture of Miss Georgia Cavett, a longtime teacher, and her girls basketball team taken in 1912. Also, Jack Lyle has pictures of his Dad, W.A., and his aunt Rose in their basketball uniforms. This means the school had gotten back to full strength, participating in high school sports.

The UIL, the governing body of interscholastic competitions in Texas, got its start in 1905 by holding a state track meet in Austin. It became official in 1911. We know Dripping Springs was competing in the county meets because W.A. Lyle won a medal in pole vault in 1917. The UIL would add tennis (1914), boys basketball (1915) and girls basketball (1918) to the list of available sports.

We will continue this trip down memory lane next week.