The PSAL holds competitions in a wide range of indoor and outdoor sports in fall, winter and spring seasons.

Compared to other major cities, the athletics program for the New York boroughs were backwards, underdeveloped, and rife with corruption.

In the spring, the league held its first outdoor high school track and field championship, won by Brooklyn Boys.

This procedure lasted until about the fall of 1913, when the number of football contenders made it impossible to schedule sufficient games to decide on one champion.

Finally, the PSAL began sponsoring football competition by boroughs in the fall of 1919, but no official championships were recognized.

In the Bronx one of the premier powers was DeWitt Clinton, which took more than its share of trophies in the basketball, swimming, track and field, tennis, and football.

Queens produced Jamaica (in ice hockey and rifle marksmanship), Richmond Hill (in golf), and Flushing (in cross country and track and field).

Besides Clinton, the Bronx could boast of Morris, which dominated rifle marksmanship early on and took several national championships, and also did well in soccer and tennis.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, new athletic powers came, such as Jefferson, Textile, Brooklyn Technical High School, Monroe, and Madison.

[4] In 2010, the National Women's Law Center filed a lawsuit with the Office for Civil Rights of the United States Department of Education, claiming that the NYCDOE provided inadequate opportunities for female high school sports compared to those for males.

The complaint alleged many public high schools in the city did not offer any girls teams in several sports, a violation of Title IX.

[6] In 2015, the ensuing federal investigation concluded that the NYCDOE violated Title IX by failing to provide an equal opportunity for female students to participate in sports.

[10] In November 2014, Garcia-Rosen filed a second complaint with the US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights alleging that the PSAL continued to violate Title XI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by not providing students of color with equitable access to a diverse range of PSAL sports teams.