November 19, 1932

Heavy rains in Poughkeepsie forced the “Bengals,” a field hockey team composed of Princeton athletes who knew nothing of the sport, owned no equipment and had practiced only once, to cancel a match with the Vassar field hockey team.

In 1931, the Vassar team won over a team from Yale—apparently similar in composition and experience to Princeton’s—by a score of 2 to1, and Vassar-Yale and Vassar-Princeton matches in 1934 ended in defeat for Vassar, whose umpire, Virginia Fessenden ’35, declared the visitors had violated “practically every principle of the game.”

Vassar had fielded teams in the sport since it was introduced at the college in 1902 by English field hockey pioneer Constance Appleby.