[1] With John Heisman, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Pop Warner, Fielding H. Yost, and George Halas, Camp was one of the most accomplished persons in the early history of American football.

[3] He attended Yale Medical School from 1880 to 1883,[1] where his studies were interrupted first by an outbreak of typhoid fever and then by work for the Manhattan Watch Company.

[3] In 1873, Camp attended a meeting where representatives from Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, and Yale universities created the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA).

[4] Harvard player Nathaniel Curtis took one look at Camp, then only 156 pounds, and told Yale captain Gene Baker "You don't mean to let that child play, do you?

On Christmas Day, 1894, Amos Alonzo Stagg and his University of Chicago Maroons defeated Camp's Stanford team 24–4 at San Francisco in an early intersectional contest.

Camp was on the various collegiate football rules committees that developed the American game from his time as a player at Yale until his death.

Camp was also responsible for introducing the "safety," the awarding of two points to the defensive side for tackling a ball carrier in his own end zone followed by a free kick by the offense from its own 20-yard line to restart play.

The NCAA emerged from the national talks, but worked to Yale's disadvantage relative to rival (and Roosevelt's alma mater) Harvard University, according to Branch.

In a column in the popular magazine Harper's Weekly, sports columnist Caspar Whitney had applied the nickname; the sobriquet was appropriate because, by 1892, Camp had almost single-handedly fashioned the game of modern American football.

For example, Wilton S. Farnsworth's 1910 All-American eleven for the New York Evening Journal was made up of five players from Harvard, two from West Point, and one each from Yale, Princeton, Penn, and Brown.

"[11] The article noted: Eastern sporting editors must be devoid of all sense of humor, judging by the way in which they permit their football writers to pick 'All-American' elevens.

While working as an adviser to the United States military during World War I, he devised a program to help servicemen become more physically fit.

Walter Camp has just developed for the Naval of setting up exercises that seems to fill the bill; a system designed to give a man a running jump start for the serious work of the day.

[16] The names of the exercises in the original Daily Dozen, as the whole set became known, were hands, grind, crawl, wave, hips, grate, curl, weave, head, grasp, crouch, and wing.

[18] Starting in 1921 with the Musical Health Builder record sets, Camp began offering morning setting-up exercises to a wider market.