Basketball
In the Chicago area basketball did not take hold among the Cook County schools until 1895, and then curiously only as a girls sport. In the fall of 1895, Austin (and reportedly Englewood as well) started up teams and played against squads from University of Chicago, Lake Forest College, and Hull House. In the fall of 1896, Oak Park organized a team and the first interscholastic girls' game in Illinois, and perhaps the first in the nation, was played on December 18 between Oak Park and Austin. The extra year's experience of Austin was telling as Oak Park was beaten 16 to 4. Englewood and Evanston also joined in interscholastic competition that year. The 1898 constitution recognized girls' basketball as one of the league's sports, but it was not until February, 1900, that league competition leading to a championship was established. The teams competing in the league the first year were Austin, Englewood, Hyde Park, and West Division. Oak Park had a team but chose not to join that first year. Englewood beat Austin for the title in 1900.
The earliest schoolboy basketball in Illinois was played by an affiliated school of the University of Chicago, Morgan Park Academy, which was competing against its parent school and YMCAs during 1893 and 1894. Its enthusiasm for the game did not last, however, because in 1896 when the Morgan Park Academy helped form the Academic League the only sports played were football, baseball, tennis, and track and field. The earliest basketball played by a public high school was in 1896, when North Division competed against YMCAs and other athletic clubs.
Meanwhile, championship competition continued for the girls through the 1905-06 season, but the Victorian attitudes of educators put an end to it. Chicago superintendent of schools Edwin G. Cooley, who was making it his crusade to bring interscholastics under control, began putting pressure on the principals to stop the formation of the league in January, 1906. The girls managed to persevere with a league that season, probably with the support of sympathetic principals, but the following year Cooley prevailed and the league contests were ended, and schoolgirl basketball in the city went into rapid decline. A few schools, notably Hyde Park and North Division, continued to field teams to at least 1910.
Meanwhile, boys' competition grew dramatically after it finally took hold in 1900. The first interscholastic game on record in Illinois was that between Englewood and Elgin on March 2, 1900, and the very next year the game had mushroomed so much that a league of eight schools was formed—Englewood, English High, Evanston, Hyde Park, Marshall, Medill, North Division, and West Division. The number of schools steadily increased each year and the competition intensified until the demise of the league.
Read more about this topic: Cook County High School League
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)