The first two sports that Chicago area schools adopted for competition were — not surprisingly — football and baseball. Baseball preceded football, probably by many years, but to pin down the dates as to when either began would be impossible. This is because the researcher must face the problem of the unavailability of records from the 1870s and early 1880s regarding high school activities — it was an era before yearbooks and high school newspapers — and archives carry few if any high school materials from the 1880s and certainly nothing from the 1870s. Football in some high schools probably emerged in the late 1870s, and during the early 1880s it became established as an interscholastic sport, albeit somewhat tentatively throughout the 1880s. The earliest games were no more than sandlot scrimmages but as the years wore on some schools developed programs with uniforms, formally refereed games, and laid-out playing fields.
In Evanston, for example, the local high school put together a sandlot team in the fall of 1879 and played a couple of games against Northwestern Academy and one against Northwestern University. They won the games against the preparatory boys, but what made their season was their victory over the university boys. And did they gloat, "We notice that the N.W.Us did not stop bragging until the game was played. It is now about time for them to 'let up.' Two weeks ago the high school boys 'had the brass' to challenge the university club of the college league to a match game. The high school boys did not expect to [win], and went up to give the university boys practice in order that they might be better prepared to play the Racine club. The thing was now for the university boys to 'take the conceit of the high school'..." And so on as the reporter tells how the high school boys slaughtered the university boys.
Similarly, in the fall of 1881, Lake View High was playing football, meeting and losing to Northwestern University on December 10th. The middle/upper class nature of the contests can be gathered by the nature of the entertainment after the games. "In the evening," reported the community's newspaper, Lake View Telephone, "the Evanston team with their ladies received the high school boys in handsome style at the residence of John Barnum. The judge was in a happy mood, Prof. and Mrs. Nightingale were present, and the whole affair was highly enjoyable." The practice of providing receptions and refreshments in the evening, usually provided by the "ladies," after games was a common one during the 1880s and early 1890s.
Most all the secondary schools at this time, however, were probably not playing any football games, not even the sandlot variety. A reference in a 1904 Hyde Park yearbook quotes an 1881 alumnus of the school as saying 1881 was "before football teams" as a general memory of what high school days were like.
The way high schools, as well as universities, organized football teams was to organize a club first, around which an "eleven," to use the vernacular of the day, would be built. The clubs then issued challenges to other schools to participate in games. There were no teachers, no coaches, and no uniforms. Occasionally there were schedules and leagues. There was probably a crudely laid-out field. The Cook County schools made it a practice to play at what they called "The Hallows," which was apparently a field at the south end of Lake Park, around 12th street and Michigan. (Lake Park was the predecessor part to Grant Park, and was a narrow strip between Michigan Avenue and the lake.)
In 1883, the High School Journal, a collective newspaper for all the county's highs, began publication, and thereafter one can find regular reports of club activities in the available issues held by the Chicago Historical Society. An early issue of interest dates from November 1884. In it, a South Division student reported that "our boys have organized 'The Football Association of S.D.H.S.' The club is ready to play against any similar organization in or out of our neighboring high schools, and would suggest to the boys of any school in which there is no club, the advisability of forming one. On October 10th and 17th, we defeated Manual Training, 2 to 1 and 1 to 0, respectively and hope in the near future to play the Chicago University club." In November South Division split a pair of games against Chicago University (not the University of Chicago, but an earlier school that is now defunct). Other high schools also reported forming clubs, but no other game reports appeared in the Journal that year.
The single-digit low scores that South Division reported indicate that they were still playing under the intercollegiate rules of the previous years, before the adoption of numerical scoring. The game was primarily a kicking game, but it was not what later became known as soccer. Rather, what the schools were playing was the evolving game of intercollegiate football, in which touching of the ball with the hands was allowed. Players could bat the ball and because it was so rounded in that era they could dribble it as well.
In the fall of 1885, with the approval of teachers, a number of schools formed a high school football league, drawing up a constitution, a set of football rules, and a schedule of games. The organization was called the "High School Foot Ball League." Schools playing that year were South Division, North Division, Manual Training, Lake View, and Hyde Park. The pages of the Journal during the fall and winter were alive with reports of schools meeting in competition. A North Division reporter indicated that these games had audiences: "We are glad to see so many of the young ladies in attendance at the football games. We don't doubt that they look on us 'footballists' with feelings of envy, and would like to help us win more games." Some of the games ended because of darkness and some never took place because one or both schools failed to show. Lake View reported that of its seven games, three were completed.
In the fall of 1886 saw the formation of a new football league. The schools adopted "intercollegiate rules," meaning the evolving game of American football. A representative of North Division suggested that there was a need of a tangible prize and suggested a pennant. He also thought there shouldn't be a money prize.
After the propitious start, however, the football season quickly deteriorated. West Division's team had to disband when some parents objected to their boys playing. North Division withdrew from the league in opposition to the adoption of intercollegiate rules, and Lake View's team got battered and bruised. Referring to the latter, the Journal correspondent noted, "The Lake View eleven is about busted! We have not had a good game since our attempt to play the Harvards [Harvard Academy]. We had one man knocked senseless and another laid up for a week, while several received lesser pummelings. Some members of the team have taken to tennis and have no time to practice. Have hopes of reorganizing." Dubious practices, such as the importation of ringers, had already developed. In an anonymous letter to the Journal, a North Division fan chided the South Division team members, asking "how many don't got to school at all?" By December, the football league had died and a South Division reporter remarked, "At last the great boom has completely died out."
One of the earliest private schools in the area to adopt football was Harvard School in Hyde Park. As early as the fall of 1886 the Chicago Tribune was reporting on their scores, one of which was a 32-4 shellacking by Northwestern University. The same year Harvard beat an amateur team, the Wanderers, 48-0. Harvard School in the appeared to be most active in the fall of 1887, beating a Manual Training team and a pick-up club team called the Chicagos. Among the teams that normally constituted a Cook County league, only Hyde Park, West Division, and Manual Training managed to field teams that fall.
The fall 1888 season saw an explosion of activity, with competition being dominated by the Harvard School, which beat South Division, West Division, Manual Training, Hyde Park, and Englewood. At the end of the season, the Harvard School traveled to South Bend and took on Notre Dame University, which was just in its infancy as a football power. Notre Dame prevailed 20 to 0. Hyde Park mysteriously put in a claim for the championship fall of 1888, having won six of seven games. Its only loss, it claimed, was to West Division, which had won three and lost three. West Division also claimed the championship and would back up its claim by playing "any high school in the country." Besides the mediocre .500 record, the school had also lost to Harvard 72-0.
Perhaps these schools were purposely not counting Harvard, assuming it to be some sort of "superteam." Although the team was reputedly representing the school, it counted among its members three students of South Division. Apparently, the ethos of the day did not bar the formation of teams that gathered students from other schools.
The absurd claims of Hyde Park and West Division leads to the question as to what public schools had football teams, sandlot or otherwise, in 1888. Philadelphia Central was meeting private academies as early as 1877 on the football field, and Detroit High played its first games in 1888 in a schedule that included university clubs and nearby Albion High. Around the Ann Arbor area there was high school football competition as early as 1888. Well known is the earliest continuous annual football competition between Boston English and Boston Latin, which began in the fall of 1887, but both schools had club teams for several years before that landmark date. Also, Boston in 1888 had a full-fledged league — with uniforms, referees, fields — involving area schools. Another famous annual competition was that between the Baltimore City College High school and Baltimore Polytech High, which began in 1888. In the New York area, however, football was at first played by the Interscholastic League, the conference of private schools, in the fall of 1892 and by a few public schools the following year. The developments in the Chicago area it would seem reflected the developments in pockets throughout the northeast section of the country.
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. That this was a genuine league was evident in that the Chicago Tribune took sufficient notice to run a report on its formation. No longer were football games just a matter of a bunch of kids getting together for games. Hyde Park won all its games and the league's first championship. The following year, South Division and Evanston joined the league and football was thoroughly established among Cook County high schools.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Illinois High School Association.