When did "crew" become a sport? When did "crew team" come into use?

When I was a child, there was a sport called rowing; if four or more people rowed together in the same boat, they would be known as a crew. At some point, either before or during my childhood, the sport itself began to be known by the name crew.

To my great horror, when I went to college, I began to hear people speaking about the crew team, as in, "my roommate is thinking about joining the crew team."

When did "crew" become the name for the sport? I looked in my trusty (but somewhat dated) compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which did not shed any light on the matter, as this sense of the word "crew" was not to be found.

More to the point, when did people start using "crew team"? I did not find this phrase at all in the OED, nor did I expect to.

In colleges, the term "crew" for the sport of rowing has been used in the United States for over a hundred years. Here is a 1914 reference to "went out for crew", and Here is a Google Books reference from 1898 where the sport itself is called "boat-racing" but where "was on the crew" is used to mean that you participated in it. In my experience in the U.S., for at least the last 40 years "crew" has been a considerably more common term for the sport than "rowing". Finally, here is a 1911 record book from Syracuse university containing the dreadfully redundant phrase "The 'Varsity crew team began practice" (which phrase seems to not have become common until much later).

I'm going to guess that you went to college sometime in the 1980s, or early 1990s, as that's when the term started to grow into common use, much to your "great horror."

The Google Ngram shows the seemingly-redundant 2-word term gaining momentum in the 1970s, and then increasing rather sharply in the 1980s. However, a bulk of the earlier occurrences of the phrase are referring to a small team of individuals working together outside of a rowboat, such as a team of factory workers, an aircraft crew, or a maintenance team. Still, a few references to the "crew team" – that is, the rowing team – stretch back into the 1970s, such as this one, in the wake of the 1970 Kent State tragedy:

Later in the week, members of the crew team rowed wearing black armbands, and some members of the track team also wore them while competing.

or this one, from a 1977 magazine:

Lind took up rowing at California State University, Long Beach when her then-boyfriend went out for the crew team.

1980s references to "the crew team" abound, and are too numerous to list here.

Perhaps the most interesting occurrence I found was from a Stanford photographic history album, which had a picture of the "1916 Crew Team." The book was published in 1989, though, so that verbiage may be part of a modern caption, and perhaps those 1916 rowers would have been as horrified to hear that terminology as you were.