Cook County High School League
[1] The formal date for the establishment of the Cook County High School Athletic League, which served Chicago and its suburbs, is 1898.
During the years of this sandlot phase Chicago schoolboys were inventing interscholastic sports, undoubtedly patterning their approach after what they saw in the universities at the time.
Participating schools in the league were West Division, Hyde Park, Manual Training, Lake View, and Englewood.
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.
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.
Track and field was the third sport to garner interscholastic interest, with the earliest references dating back to December 1886.
Clearly track and field established itself during 1889 to 1891 as an organized sport in which participating schools thought themselves members of a Cook County conference, paralleling similar developments in football and baseball.
Indoor baseball to the uninitiated was the predecessor sport of softball and popular in Chicago during the 1890s and during the first decade after the turn of the century.
A 17-inch ball and a narrow bat was used so as to facilitate play inside armories and similarly large indoor facilities.
On June 18, the Tribune reported on the "first annual tournament of the Cook County High School Lawn Tennis Association," held in Oak Park.
Instead a "Western Interscholastic Tennis Games" was held involving "high and preparatory schools" at the University of Chicago.
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.
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.
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.
