Illinois schools compared to those on the East Coast lagged a few years behind when it came to developing a program of indoor track and field competition. The earliest indoor track and field meets for secondary schools were conducted in New York and Boston by private schools. In New York City the prep schools of the Interscholastic Association conducted their first indoor competition with the Barnard School games in 1890. Another meet sponsored by Berkeley School was added to the calendar in 1892. Boston in 1890 saw the inauguration of the New England games conducted at the famed Mechanics Building. The Boston Athletic Association the following year added another meet for secondary schools to the winter schedule.
Whereas competition in such sports as football, indoor baseball, baseball, and tennis were student-led and managed in the 1890s, track and field was a different matter. As in the other sports the students ran the track and field program in their respective schools through their captains and managers, but they were highly dependent on obtaining facilities and equipment to conduct interscholastic competition, and in the winter a large indoor facility was essential. It was a rare high school at this time that had a gymnasium with an indoor oval. For secondary school competition to take place the high school athletes were dependent on such institutions as National Guard regiments and universities to provide the venues and sponsorship for track and field. In the 1890s the foremost indoor track venue in Chicago was the First Regiment Armory at 16th and Michigan on the near South Side.
In the Chicago area, indoor competition for high schools began in 1895. In March of that year, three Cook County schools--Englewood, Hyde Park, and South Division--entered a relay race that was a part of a Chicago Athletic Association (CAA) meet at the First Regiment Armory that involved amateur, college, and high school students. During the next twenty years it was common for public and private secondary schools to participate in such meets, usually involving no more than a relay or two.
The University of Chicago for three years, 1896-98, sponsored a high school relay as part of their annual indoor meet held at the First Regiment Armory. In the first two years of the meet, the secondary schools were limited to just relay races, but in the third annual and final meet the program was expanded to include jumping, walking, and various running events, and a team championship was determined for each group of schools, public and private. The first meet was held in the First Regiment Armory and last meet was held Tattersall's, 16th and Dearborn. Throughout the decade the University of Chicago also made its small gymnasium available for occasional high school dual meets.
Some National Guard units not only supplied their facilities to conduct meets they also formed athletic associations to form teams and to conduct meets. The foremost National Guard meet in Chicago was one conducted by the First Regiment Armory Athletic Association, at varying dates from January through March, at its armory. The first meet was held in 1897, and it was continued into the 1920s when the First Regiment had become the 111th Infantry Brigade. These meets would bring together the top amateur teams--notably those of the First Regiment, Chicago Athletic Association, and the Central YMCA--university teams, and high school teams.
There were always some events at the First Regiment meet that were limited to high school contestants alone, usually a couple of sprints, and always a relay race. Sometimes there would be a separate relay race each for private academies and for high schools, but if the number of entries were few there would be one combined relay. The secondary school relays were always one of the more popular events in the indoor meet. The Tribune, reporting on the relay in a University of Chicago meet in 1897, said, "The noisiest events of the night were the team races between high schools, for in every part of the hall and in every gallery were 'rooters,' and the girls of Englewood, Hyde Park, and English High, and delegations from Northwestern Academy, Harvard School, University School, Princeton-Yale School, and Morgan Park Academy were urging on their candidates." In regard to the January 1898 First Regiment Armory meet the paper reported, "The relay races were easily the features of the evening, and the high school runners especially distinguished themselves." The following year at another First Regiment meet it was noted regarding the high school events that "the relay races formed the best part of the program."
In a unique feature of the indoor season, most of the events would combine all the athletes of different ages and at marked levels of ability, and to equalize the competition officials would handicap each of the contestants. In a 100-yard sprint, for example, each of the runners, based on their previous efforts, would be given a different starting mark--the best runners farthest back and the least accomplished ones farthest up front. Disputes often arose at such meets over officials' judgements in determining each contestant's handicap. In the 1897 First Regiment Armory meet, the Tribune reported complaints against the famed Amos Alonzo Stagg, "the handicapping was not satisfactory to all the entries, as generally happens. All the University of Chicago men except possibly one were loud in their complaint. The blame was not laid against the official handicapper, however, but against Stagg. The doughty professor sent down his opinions to the handicapper and it appears that he overestimated his men in almost all cases." Undoubtedly there was injustices in such arrangements, but most contemporaries were happy with the system and handicapped track and field competition thrived for a quarter of a century.
The year 1895 also saw the first Cook County High School League indoor tournament. It was sponsored the first year by the CAA and held at the First Regiment Armory. The meet was won by South Division, which edged Hyde Park 23 to 21 for league honors. The CAA dropped its support after the 1895 meet, and for the 1896 meet sponsorship was jointly taken up ad hoc by the University of Chicago and the First Regiment Armory. Englewood won the meet, and the Tribune gushed:
"A howling mob of high school enthusiasts saw the purple and white of Englewood crowd all the other colors out of the rainbow at the First Regiment Armory last night. The young athletes from the classic suburb piled up a total of 40 points out of a possible 102. Hyde Park came second with 31...The meet was the best managed one ever held in Chicago, and all honor is due to Prof. Stagg, who had the affair in charge, and the First Battalion of the regiment, under the command of Lieut. Lattan. The genial commander was everywhere at once and took keen delight in "firing" off the floor those who no business there. Gold medals were awarded as first prizes and silver ones for second; banners were given in the team races, and everyone was suited with what they got."
The Cook County League tournament, however, expired after the 1896 meet, despite the generous sponsorship for the meet and the newspaper-claim that the event was "a great success." Apparently, the meet lost its sponsorship and the high schools were unable to continue to conduct an indoor meet without it.
The most ambitious indoor meet of the 1890s was the 1897 huge extravaganza held in the Coliseum called the Military and Athletic Carnival. It was jointly sponsored by the Central Division of the AAU, the First Regiment Armory, and Bankers' Athletic Club. The meet was originally scheduled to be held in April, but the CAA precipitously pulled out of sponsorship and forced the meet into mid-May. Athletic contests were conducted for leading amateurs, for contestants from military units, and for high schools. The Knickerbocker Athletic Club in New York and the Pacific Athletic Club were some of the many out-of-town athletic clubs that sent contestants. The CAA sent a large contingent to the meet as well. There was no participation from the colleges and universities. Raymond Ewry, representing on his own Purdue University, however, participated in the standing high and standing broad jumps, which he both won. Ewry was fast becoming the greatest in those events, and won a host of Olympic Medals in the next decade.
The Military and Athletic Carnival was held over a six-day period and involved thousands of athletes. The second day of the meet featured high school night, and the organizers presented five running events--100 yards to one mile--and a mile bicycle race involving the public high schools in the Cook County League. No team totals were listed. On May 12 there were separate running events held for schools of the Preparatory League and for the Academic League. Again no team totals were listed. On the final day, the secondary school relay races--saved for the last for their marquee value--were held for the Cook County League schools and for the Preparatory League schools, won respectively by Hyde Park and Manual Training.
The organizers were disappointed in the turnout for the meet, and another one was never attempted. It was too big, too unwieldy, a case of too many athletes chasing after too few paying customers.
The Central Division of the American Athletic Union (AAU) beginning in 1899 provided for a relay race for secondary schools along with program of track and field events held for university and club teams. The first seven meets were held in Milwaukee and usually the relay was a competition between Milwaukee and Chicago schools. In 1904 there was enough schools to provide separate relay races for public and private schools. No high school relay race was conducted in the 1906 meet, which was held in Cincinnati. Beginning in 1907 the Central AAU meet thereafter was for much of its history held in Chicago. The date of the meet varied from early March to early April. The last year the Central AAU meet featured the secondary school relay race was 1915. Thereafter, the meet featured various high school competitions, which in some meets were of sufficient number to total points for a team championship.
The Illinois Athletic Club (IAC) was organized in 1904, but its club house on Michigan Avenue would not be completed until the last half of 1907. But it quickly wanted to establish itself in Chicago's sports arena, and it did so by sponsoring an annual charity indoor meet for private clubs, business and government agency sponsored teams, military units, YMCAs, universities, secondary schools, and grammar schools. The IAC held the meet in the Coliseum in the two years of its existence, 1905 and 1906. The IAC sponsored the meet ironically at a time just when the private athletic clubs were disengaging from sponsoring high school track and field events, and the 1906 meet was the last activity by the organization involving high school track and field.
After the turn of the century, the universities took the lead in sponsoring high school meets. As we had seen the University of Chicago had often included a high school relay event with its indoor meets against other universities, and it hosted an occasional dual meet between high schools. But its small gymnasium prevented the school from taking an aggressive role in sponsoring high school competition. In 1904 the university completed its much larger Bartlett Gymnasium, and authorities of the Cook County League eyed the facility as an opportunity to build a comprehensive indoor track and field program for the high schools.
The Board of Control of the league formed a track and field committee headed by an Oak Park teacher, Albert L. Clark, to "arrange a systematized series of meets." Under Clark's guidance the committee submitted a proposal to schedule five meets--three preliminary, a semi-final, and a final. Points would be accumulated from one meet to the next, and the winner would be declared at the end of the final meet. The Board of Control approved the plan on January 16, 1904, but the key hitch was to obtain Bartlett Gymnasium as a facility and to get the University of Chicago to act as sponsor.
Clark wrote to Stagg and diffidently begged him for university sponsorship, "the suggestion has been made that it might be possible to induce you to take hold of these meets and run them; i.e., supplying gymnasium, ribbons, officials, medals, etc. The Committee is desirous of making this a yearly event and consequently having a medal that is distinctive and of such design that it shall be adopted as a permanent medal."
Stagg was sold on the idea and scheduled each of the meets as part of dual indoor meets with Western Conference schools. The cost was not inconsiderable. The university had to provide expensive medals to the first three contestants, which at $13. per set was not cheap in 1904. They were ordered from a New York jewelry firm. The total cost for the medals, team banner, and other awards came to around 150 dollars. The admission to each of the early meets was 25 cents and to the final meet 50 cents. The Board of Control would collect one-quarter of the proceeds. No rent for the facility would be charged to the league. The meets were held from January through March, and championship being won by North Division before the largest crowd that had "witnessed a track contest in the Bartlett Gymnasium."
After the final meet, Stagg praised Clark for his "conception and organization plan for the indoor meets." A year later the Inter-Ocean summed up the first season in Bartlett: "With the completion of the handsome new building a new era dawned for high school athletes as well as for the students on the Midway."
Meanwhile, in December of 1903, New York's Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL) had been launched with a huge indoor track and field meet for high schools and grammar schools, and educators across the country hailed the program as the best and most ambitious of any in the country. This was certainly true for grammar school competition, but with regard to high school competition Chicago offered an impressive alternative. The writer of the Inter-Ocean, showing perhaps provincial boosterism, hailed the Chicago system:
"A better system of conducting a championship, where so many schools are involved, does not exist in the country. To begin with the place of holding the meets is ideal. The main room of Bartlett gymnasium is spacious, beautiful, and airy, It has a straightaway of fifty yards, a perfectly constructed track thirteen and a half laps to the mile, an a seating capacity for 1,500 persons. Besides, every accommodation known to modern athletic science is afforded the athletes in the way of lockers, rubbing rooms, baths, etc."
The University of Chicago took another step in its support of high school indoor track in 1905, when it offered Bartlett Gymnasium as a practice facility. The university had for several years permitted its outdoor facility, Marshall Field, to be used for training by local high school students, and this was just a continuation of the university's benevolence. Reported the Tribune:
"The plan, as outlined by Dr. [Joseph E.] Raycroft, provides for the opening of the gymnasium parts of three days each week for the use of high school men, the days designated being Monday and Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings. Heretofore the track has been open to the athletes from Hyde Park, Englewood, and several other high schools, but the present measure is to include all secondary institutions that may wish to enter into the work."
Englewood and Hyde Park because of their proximity to the university had always been the beneficiary of the school's largess, and the university had over the years benefitted in return by getting many of Englewood's and Hyde Park's top athletes--although they lost as many to Michigan and other rivals as well. The university stood to gain from expanding the base of high school students who would use its facilities. The Inter-Ocean expressed this point in a round-about fashion:
"The part the university plays in developing the high school athletes of Cook County is as unselfish as it is unique and effective. The preps are allowed the freedom of the gymnasium certain afternoons in the week for training, so that they keep in good condition and accustom themselves to the turns of the track and to the atmosphere of the place. Bartlett Gymnasium is open to all the athletes of the schools, no matter to what college they may expect to go. In view of the well known tendency of the stars of Chicago high schools to go away to college the attitude of the university approaches the altruistic. In the long run, however, Chicago will probably draw more than her share of the youngsters she is helping to train, and in that way reap reward for trouble and expense."
And Stagg made use of all of the university's assets to lure potential recruits, and using frat men to beguile high school boys was one such technique, as noted in his personal notes after one season of competition: "A pleasant and beneficial feature was promoted by our university undergraduates in entertaining the high school men. On the evening of the preliminary meets the various fraternities entertained all the competitors at supper."
The University of Chicago's new sponsorship of high school indoor track was deemed to have an immediate impact on building the sport in the high schools. The Inter-Ocean reported on the 1905 season: "The final meet of the Cook County High School Athletic league, held at Bartlett Gymnasium Saturday night, brought to a close the most successful indoor season for high school athletics ever known in Chicago."
In 1903 the university had inaugurated an intersectional competition in outdoor track and field with the holding of its first national meet. Similar outdoor events were held on the East Coast as well, and such meets found sponsorship not only among universities but also amateur clubs, and alumni groups. Likewise interscholastic indoor contests of intersectional scope by such groups also arose in the first decade of the century. One of the most prestigious East Coast indoor meets was conducted by Club Princeton beginning in 1911, and Newark Central HS of New Jersey began what it called a "national interscholastic" in 1918. The East Coast meets, however, could not match the prestige and national importance of the Northwestern Indoor Interscholastic inaugurated in 1910. In the first few years of the meet, which was always held the last weekend in March, the competition mainly involved Illinois schools, but after World War I it became more national in scope and called itself a "national interscholastic." Most of the schools invited to the Northwestern Indoor Interscholastic were drawn from Midwest states, but its reach went further than that of the Newark Central tourney. Michigan schools dominated the competition at the height of the tournament's prestige, and in the final two years, Gary Froebel, a true national power, won the meet. The prestige of the tournament was enhanced by the addition of a national swimming meet in 1914, and a national wrestling meet in 1929.
Other Midwest indoor meets with a national scope that drew Illinois schools during the 1920s were the University of Michigan indoor meet held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1927-1932, and the National Academy meet held in Madison, Wisconsin, 1928-1932.
In 1920 Stagg inaugurated the University of Chicago Indoor Cook County Championship to provide city and suburban schools regular indoor competition before their league competition in March. The first year the interscholastic was conducted as a series of four meets from late January through the third week of February in Bartlett Gymnasium, and the winner was determined by the accumulated points from the four meets. In all subsequent years the series was limited to three meets. This was in effect a continuation of the old Cook County League indoor meets. Oak Park, Hyde Park, and Senn tended to dominate the competition, except for 1923 when super-athletic Eugene Goodwillie almost single-handedly garnered University High the championship.
Although Oak Park won six out of the eight tournament series, there was a quite of bit animosity between the school and the administrators of the tournament. In 1927, after the first preliminary meet, Frank J. Winters, Athletic Director at Oak Park, wrote a scathing letter of complaint to Stagg:
"For the past three years we have observed instances when Hyde Park has been favored in the drawings and also in decisions at the finish. I attribute this to the selection of the officials. In the past a number of the positions of importance have been held by inexperienced and immature boys, and on account of their enthusiasm and desire for their high school to win they are the improper ones to have as officials...These meets for several years have been a battle between Hyde Park and Oak Park, so what we ask is that Hyde Park athletes be given no more advantageous positions than our men. I realize that these meets are not dual meets between H.P. and O.P., but it usually amounts to that since we are both at the top."
During the days of the Cook County League officials and judges were drawn from the university staff, members of the Board of Control, and prominent amateur athletes. In 1911, for example, famed track and field star Hugo Friend and Stagg worked as timers. By the 1920s adult authorities were not willing to work high school meets as officials, and apparently Stagg had to recruit them from Hyde Park High, which looked like to outside observers to be the university's "farm team." Oak Park believed with some justification that the Hyde Park boys were not always fair in the invariable disputes that arose in such events. Stagg by this time rarely attended these meets, and wrote back to Winters, "until this year, as a rule, I haven't been able to attend the first meet and usually some others...I was not aware of there being any criticism of favoritism." The series in 1927, which was won by Hyde Park, was the last held by the university, which in no small part felt relieved to end what was becoming a headache.
By the late 1920s, secondary school educators were not too concerned with the local meets held by the University of Chicago, but had developed considerable apprehension over the proliferation of national meets for high schoolers. After 1930 the National Federation prevailed upon Northwestern, Michigan, and other universities to discontinue their sponsorship of interscholastic meets.
The high schools by the late 1920s had taken a greater role in sponsoring their own track and field meets, although most were hampered by a lack of indoor facilities. Perennial track and field power Oak Park took the lead among Chicago area high schools in supporting indoor track and field by building a spectacular $750,000 field house in late 1927. The Chicago Herald & Examiner earlier in the year gushed over the impending structure:
"The field house will contain four inside gymnasiums and one outdoor on the roof, two swimming pools and eventually an auditorium to seat 1,000 people. It will be built in units, which when completed, will serve a maximum of 5,000 students...The field house will measure 219 feet by 128 feet. Among other features it will contain a running track ten feet wide. It will allow 300 boys and 300 girls to take their physical training at one time."
Decades later the huge Oak Park indoor track facility still inspires awe from those who first lay their eyes upon it. The field house was a significant symbol of the changing of the guard in high school indoor track; that is, the shift from university to high school support of the sport. The field house in subsequent years not only helped Oak Park maintain its preeminence in track and field, indoor and out, it helped immeasurably to sustain and promote indoor track in particular as a sport for all schools in the area. Oak Park began sponsoring it famed Oak Park Relays in 1931 and eventually sponsored a separate meet for facility-hampered Chicago schools. In later decades such suburban schools as Bloom and Evanston also built impressive indoor track facilities, which helped those schools build winning track and field programs.
The Public League schools found themselves increasingly at a disadvantage as more and more suburban schools built indoor track facilities. No longer were the facilities of the universities and the armories made available to the schools and the Chicago schools became accustomed to practicing in the halls and holding dual meets in them. The Public League continued to hold its indoor championship meets at the University of Chicago, but in 1978 the cash-strapped league held its last indoor track meet after the university raised the rent on its renovated field house. In 1985 the Public League banned hallway running following a serious accident to a sprinter. Illinois indoor track and field, which was originated by the city schools, for all intent and purposes had died in the place of its birth. Because indoor track and field is considered essential for the development of any topnotch outdoor program the city schools have ceased to be a power in the state since the mid-1980s.
Published with permission. All rights are reserved by the author.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Illinois High School Association.