Although sports and military preparedness have been intertwined throughout human history, armed combat between 1914 and 1919 made federally financed sports and athletics central components of morale and military preparedness for the first time in American history. American soldiers had participated in various sports and athletic contests between the Civil War and World War I, but no formal policy existed and few commanders were interested in promoting an athletic component as an antidote to saber exercises, revolver practice, line skirmishes, and mounted drills. By the turn of the twentieth century, a new generation of officers maintained that physical training should precede all specifically military activities—an idea incorporated in the mandatory physical training regimen instituted by Lieutenant H. J. Koehler of West Point. Prior to World War I, surveys reported that between one-third and one-half of all military recruits were physically unfit; military leaders...