football and history

Walter Camp was born April 17, 1859, in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended Yale from 1876 to 1882, where he studied medicine and business. Walter Camp was an author, athletic director, chairman of the board of the New Haven Clock Company, and director of the Peck Brothers Company. He was general athletic director and head advisory football coach at Yale University from 1888-1914, and chairman of the Yale football committee from 1888-1912. Camp played football at Yale and helped evolve the rules of the game away from Rugby and Soccer rules into the rules of American Football as we know them today.

One precursor to Walter Camp's influence was William Ebb Ellis, a student at the Rugby School in England. In 1823, Ellis was the first person noted for picking up the ball during the soccer game and running with it, thereby breaking and changing the rules. In 1876, at the Massosoit convention, the the first attempts at writing down the rules of American football were made. Walter Camp edited every American Football rulebook until his death in 1925.
             High school football is governed in the U.S. by the National Federation of State High School Associations. College football is governed in the U.S. by two bodies: theNational Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. The major league for professional football is the National Football League. Over the years, there have been other notable professional football leagues, including the All America Football Conference during the 1940s, theAmerican Football League during the 1960s, the United States Football Leagueduring the 1980s, and the currently active United Football League.

The sport is also played outside the United States. National and collegiate leagues exist in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy,^[3]Switzerland,^[4] Finland, Sweden,^[5] Japan, Mexico, Israel,^[6] Spain, Austria,^[7] and several other European, American, Asian and Pacific Island nations.^[8] The International Federation of American Football acts as an international governing body for the sport on five continents, but the organization has little standing in the United States compared to the aforementioned bodies and leagues.