As UBC celebrates its centennial year, the Department of Athletics and Recreation is pleased to posthumously honour Sherwood Lett, a pioneer of the Varsity Athletics program that is today the most successful in Canada as measured by number of CIS (and CIAU) national championships won.
As a student at UBC in its inaugural year of 1915-16, he was a member of the men’s ice hockey team and the coach of the women’s ice hockey team. After receiving a Rhodes Scholarship and completing Law studies at Oxford, he returned to a distinguished legal career in British Columbia as well as over 30 years of volunteer service to his university as a member of both the Senate and the Board of Governors. Throughout this time he was a vocal and active proponent of sport and physical activity as a fundamental component of education. Along with university colleagues Arthur Lord (inducted into UBC Sports Hall of Fame in 1993), Harry Warren (also inducted in 1993) and Gordon Shrum (inducted in 1994), he was influential in the establishment in 1946 of a program and department of Physical Education at UBC, a new academic entity whose primary objectives were to train physical educators in response to demand on the part of schools throughout the province, formalize Physical Education as pre-requisites for all UBC undergraduate students, and to bring greater sport-specific expertise to bear in the coaching of varsity teams. It was to be the first such department in Western Canada and the third in the nation following those at McGill and the University of Toronto.
The new Department of Physical Education also assumed the administrative role for the Varsity Athletics teams. It’s first faculty members and staff, including inaugural Athletic Director RJ “Bus” Phillips (inducted in 1993), were able to develop new facilities, establish partnerships with leading sport organizations such as the Vancouver Rowing Club, and attract top-flight coaches from across North America and beyond, as in the case of Australians Max Howell (inducted in 2005) and Peter Mullins (inducted in 1995).
Although UBC had produced numerous athletes who went on to great achievement and distinction prior to the establishment of the Department of Physical Education, the impact of the new department (and later School of Physical Education, Human Kinetics, and today, the UBC School of Kinesiology) was almost immediate, as exemplified by UBC providing seven members of Canada’s 1948 Olympic basketball team, coached by the department’s inaugural director and alumnus, Robert Osborne (inducted in 1993).
