Gulick Medal

The Gulick medal as taken from the 1906 International YMCA Training School Catalog. The medal, given and named after Dr. Luther Gulick, is awarded to students for a worthy thesis relating to physical education. The thesis must be based upon first-hand observation, include a study of the literature of the topic, and be a worthwhile and unproven problem.Gulick was the first director of the physical education department at Springfield College. While he was at the college, he inspired James Naismith to devise the game of basketball and was responsible for the creation and adoption of the inverted triangle used by Springfield College and the YMCA as their seals and symbols. Gulick felt the inverted triangle was the perfect symbol to represent the whole man, denoting the perfect balance of the spirit, mind and body. After leaving the Training School, Gulick served as physical education director at the Pratt Institute High School in Brooklyn and later became the first head of the physical education department for the New York public schools. Gulick and his wife, Charlotte Vedder Gulick, went on to found of the Camp Fire Girls of America in 1910 as a sister organization to the Boy Scouts of America. Luther Halsey Gulick died August 13, 1918 at his summer home in Maine