Now readying his baseball team for its opening game Tuesday, Adolph W. Samborski '26 is attempting his first Varsity assignment in 20 years of College coaching. To present undergraduates he is best known as the intramural athletic director, an Floyd Stahl's assistant last spring with the Varsity nine, as the pre-war mentor of the Freshman diamond forces, and perhaps as one of the heavy-handed overseers of compulsory calisthenics on Soldiers Field in the years just past.

A check into the dimmer past, however, reveals that Sam was also something of a scholar and athlete during his undergraduate days. While pulling down Ed.M. and A.M. degrees in history, he played Freshman soccer, basketball, and baseball, following in the latter two sports with three Varsity seasons apiece, while serving also for one year on the Jayvee football squad and for two more on the Varsity. The high point of this athletic career was reached on the basketball court, where, Sam admits, lies his greatest love. In 1921 he captained the Freshman quintet, and in his Senior year he held a like honor on the Varsity.

Since graduating in 1926, he has lived at his home in Westfield, while coaching various Jayvee and Freshman teams in the three sports in which he excelled. His outstanding and probably his most permanent mark on the local athletic scene, however, was made in 1927, when he submitted a plan for intramural athletics, which then were run off on an inter-class basis and were relatively unorganized. His program was accepted and used until 1930, when Dunster and Lowell produced House teams to supersede the class competition. The following year the five other Houses entered the field, and Sam drew up plans for the first full season of inter-House athletics, at the same time being appointed intramural director, a post which he still holds. "I guess I'm the first, last, and only," he says with a reminiscent smile in alluding to this position.

Last spring he handled the Varsity baseball team in its second Yale game, after Stahl had departed on his vacation, and continued on as coach through the summer, being appointed permanently to this position in early December when Stahl migrated westward to Ohlo State.

In preparing his initial team for combat, he is aided by a re-birth of talent on the pitching staff, while harassed by lack of outdoor practice and by an early schedule which was recently made one day earlier. The squad will now face the University of Maryland Tuesday in its opening game, following Wednesday and Thursday with two matches against Navy.