The Brawl

1929 newsreel film captures muddy San Mateo Junior College frosh-soph contest

For decades, San Mateo Junior College freshmen and sophomores vied for supremacy in The Brawl, a muddy, loud, knuckle-busting contest between classes. The Brawl was held twice a year, enabling midyear graduates to participate.

Male students watered the field next to the Baldwin Avenue campus until the mud was ankle-deep, then dived in for frosh-soph sack races, tug-of-wars and jousting. Females wiped combatants’ faces and sent them back into the fray.

A Fox Movietone News crew captured the Brawl on Feb. 19, 1929 for showing in newsreels in movie theaters throughout the United States. Students were overjoyed at this national exposure bestowed on their school, then only seven years old.

Typical of college life back then, The Brawl was just one of a near-constant round of campus parades, pranks and mayhem that spread into surrounding communities. The Noise Parade through downtown San Mateo, for example, was exactly what its name implies and just as unwelcome.

Incoming college President Charles S. Morris cracked down on such hijinks in 1931, keeping only The Brawl as a means of upholding school spirit during the deepening Great Depression. Freshman-sophomore athletic contests survived into the late 1950s at Coyote Point (including a tug-of-war for women) and, in different form, were revived at College Heights as Spring Fever into the 1990s.