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This study examines the historical significance of Jang Gwon’s activities in the sport promotion carried out by Korea’s YMCA. At its birth, the Korean YMCA’s sport promotion was closely linked with the Korean nationalist movement under Japanese colonial rule, and this link was most evident around 1920, when Jang Gwon worked as a judo master. Citing the Sokol movement in Czechoslovakia, Jang Gwon took initiatives to enlighten Korean people’s consciousness and popularize sports, including judo and basketball, across the country through the Korean YMCA’s sport promotion. In particular, Jang Gwon introduced modern judo—formally known as Gangdogwan (Kodokan judo), initiated by Jigoro Kano—in Korea and took initiatives to establish the Korean Basketball Association and the Korean Basketball Referee Association. Through the Korean YMCA’s sport promotion, Jang Gwon motivated the Korean people to aspire to liberation and independence from Japanese colonial rule. Moreover, amid the prevailing social climate, in which physical activities were discouraged due to the influence of Neo-Confucianism, he provided a paradigm shift that called for “sport for all,” which enabled the modernization of sports and physical education in Korea.

The specific information provided in this paper offers a descriptive history regarding the attempts of Southern Methodist University (SMU) to be “modern” through tracing the institution’s movement from one playing field to another. Like other southern universities, SMU started football and built an on-campus stadium of concrete and steel believing their legitimacy as an institution could be enhanced through providing football as a product for consumption. However, SMU is unique among many of its contemporaries because soon after building an on-campus facility, it decided to move off campus in the pursuit of greater name recognition and revenue. Collectively, such efforts were recognized as helping to make SMU the “educational surprise of the decade, if not the century,” following its opening in 1915. The modernization of SMU football stadia involves construction and renovation of facilities from Armstrong Field (1915) to Gerald J. Ford Stadium (current).