By George Wade; Edited by Emily Fadako
Arcadia University has 24 current sports teams, with the addition of two new wrestling teams being added in the 2025-26 year, both male and female. Arcadia has a history in athletics, dating all the way back to the early 1900s for some teams. For a lot of that history, teams practiced and competed in the Murphy Hall gymnasium, which was built in the 1920s and served as the home of Arcadia Athletics until the Kuch Center was built in 1993.
In this Murphy Hall gymnasium, Arcadia hosted various sports over the years, such as basketball, tennis, as well as their three time national champion rifle team. This rifle team won national championships in 1948, 1950, and 1951. According to the Arcadia Athletics Hall of Fame, between the years 1939 and 1951, the rifle team regularly finished as one of the top three teams in the country. They were even challenged by the U.S. Marine Corps, and beat them out with a score of 979 to the Marine Corps’ 973.
Interestingly, Arcadia even had a fencing team!
After the 1950s, Arcadia Athletics started adding the sports that you are more and more familiar with now. The university added a swim team around this time, while men’s and women’s lacrosse were added sometime between the 70’s and 80’s. During this time, all Arcadia field sports, such as soccer, lacrosse, and field hockey, played their games on the Green at the center of campus until the Jean Lenox West field was built in 2012.
One of the more interesting parts of looking through the archives of sports from the past was getting to see how some sports evolved over time. Personally, I am on the swim team here at Arcadia, and there were photos in the archives going back to the swim team from the 1940s, as pictured below.
Through these pictures, you can see the early days of swimming, with no goggles, fabric caps, and just an every day one piece bathing suit. At one point, Arcadia also had synchronized swimming and diving teams in the 1960s. From there, you can see pictures from the early 2000s where a swimmer is wearing goggles, and in 2006 with the sport introducing tech suits instead of enforcing a uniform of regular fabric swimsuits.
One thing to note through all of these sports is that Arcadia, for most of its time, was an all-female school, which then transitioned into a female-leading student body. At that time, the university had more female athletes on female teams than it did host men’s teams. One of those most famous female athletes was Jean Lenox, known now as Jean Lenox-West, who has both the turf field, Jean-Lenox West Field, and the swimming pool, Lenox Pool, here on campus named after her.
While athletics at Arcadia once started with practices in the Murphy Hall gymnasium, with teams for sports that the university does not sponsor anymore, it is interesting to see the development of the program over time through an exploration of the images from the University Archives.
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