GW football dominated the pages of The Hatchet in the early-1900s. The Hatchet wrote in 1904 that "football is the most important of fall and winter athletics."

GW football wins 1957 Sun Bowl over Texan Western

Though some news reports criticized the selection of the 1956 GW football team to a bowl game, the Colonials made those critics eat their words. The 1956 team capped off a 7-1-1 season with a shocking win over Texas Western in the 1957 Sun Bowl, held in El Paso, Texas.

The explosion of womenıs athletics at GW in the first two decades of the 1900s exemplified an increase in womenıs participation in University life. GW females played in tennis tournaments throughout the early 1900s, and the first official team was begun in 1913. The first womenıs basketball team was also inaugurated in spring 1913, with that fall marking the start of its first full season of play. Practices of more than 15 women were held once a week for an hour.

GW athletics opens new home

The opening of the Smith Center in 1975 ended what The Hatchet termed a ³40-year odyssey of broken promises.² The appeal of a new ³field house² had been used to lure recruits since the 1930s, after University President Cloyd Heck Marvin announced in 1931 that GW would have a new gym by 1932. Complaints about the condition of the ³Tin Tabernacle,² the small facility on 20th and H streets that served as a practice gym, and shoddy attendance at Ft. Myer, where the team played its home games, had plagued the program for years.