Football
One should not imagine that the competition was anywhere near as organized as it is today. Instead, boys in each of the schools formed a club with an "eleven"--to use the vernacular of the day. The clubs then issued challenges to other schools to participate in games. There were no teachers, no coaches, no uniforms, no laid-out fields, and no schedules. There were various league set up during the 1880s, but they were of the sandlot variety and more often than not they never lasted through the season.
A true football league was finally established in the fall of 1889, when the "Cook County High School Football League" was formed and a schedule of games adopted. Participating schools in the league were West Division, Hyde Park, Manual Training, Lake View, and Englewood. No longer were football games just a matter of a bunch of kids getting together for games. Hyde Park won the first Cook County championship, beating out neighboring Englewood, beginning one of the most legendary and intense rivalries in the history of Illinois high school football. The two schools dominated competition in football and other sports in the league. In the fall of 1890, South Division and Evanston joined the league and football was thoroughly established among Cook County high schools.
A true measure how well the game progressed in Chicago can be found by leaping ahead a few years to take a look at a couple intersectional competitions in which Cook County schools participated, in what were then pretentiously billed as "national championships." In the fall of 1902 Hyde Park, featuring the great Walter Eckersall at quarterback, slaughtered Brooklyn Polytechnic 105 to 0 at University of Chicago's Marshall Field. The Hyde Park coach was then hired by Polytechnic to coach their team for the following season. The following year North Division met Brooklyn Boys' High in New York and beat them 75 to 0, which was not as close as the score indicated according to the New York Times report.
Read more about this topic: Cook County High School League
Famous quotes containing the word football:
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“...I’m not money hungry.... People who are rich want to be richer, but what’s the difference? You can’t take it with you. The toys get different, that’s all. The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football. It’s all relative.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“Idon’t enjoy getting knocked about on a football field for other people’s amusement. I enjoy it if I’m being paid a lot for it.”
—David Storey (b. 1933)