The first two decades of the twentieth century was an era of turbulence for boys’ sports at Salinas High School and around the nation. Track and field and baseball were vying with football to be the most popular sport, and for a few years football was eliminated altogether and replaced by rugby. Meanwhile, girls’ athletics was surging in popularity, challenging boys’ sports for space in the annual yearbooks.
By the late 1920s, as girls’ interscholastic sports were eliminated, boys’ track and field and baseball faded in importance, and football surged to center stage in campus life. In the middle decades of the twentieth century the boys who played football—and to a lesser extent, basketball—were elevated as paragons of masculinity at Salinas High.
The annual yearbooks lavished celebratory space to football, basketball, and the growing pageantry that surrounded the games, including cheerleader-led campus rallies, marching bands, homecoming parades, and ceremonial initiations into the honorific Block “S” society for which boy athletes dressed exaggeratedly as girls and frolicked in front of the student body.
Over the past three decades, girls’ sports have exploded in size and popularity and are now given close to equitable and respectful coverage in the yearbooks. But boys’ sports—especially football and basketball—still frequently occupy center stage in building school spirit and a celebrating a sense of togetherness at Salinas High and in the broader community.