Illinois High School Association

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Illinois High School Association
Illinois High School Association
Established December 27, 1900
Members over 750 public and private high schools
Sanctioned programs 35
(14 boys' sports, 14 girls' sports,
and 7 non-athletic activities)
State Illinois
Past names Illinois High School Athletic Association
Headquarters Bloomington, Illinois
Location

The Illinois High School Association (IHSA) is one of 521 state high school associations in the United States, designed to regulate competition in interscholastic events at the high school level. It is a charter member of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). The IHSA regulates 14 sports for boys, 14 sports for girls, and eight co-educational non-athletic activities. More than 760 public and private high schools in the state of Illinois are members of the IHSA. The Association's offices are in Bloomington, Illinois.

In many sports, statewide competitions are broken down into various classes, based on school enrollment. Thus schools with the largest student populations will participate in a class independent of schools with smaller populations. Within Illinois, there are also many smaller groupings of high schools, competing with their nearby communities in conferences. There are 73 such conferences within the IHSA as of August 2005. Some of these conferences subdivide themselves into divisions.

Contents

[edit] Governance

The IHSA is headed by an eleven-member Board of Directors. All eleven members are high school principals from member schools. Seven of the ten are elected to three-year terms from seven geographic regions within the state of Illinois. Three other board members are elected at-large. A treasurer, who does not vote, is appointed by the Board. The Board of Directors determines IHSA policies and employs an executive director and staff. They also work with the Illinois General Assembly, the Illinois State Board of Education, the Illinois Principals Association, the Illinois Association of School Boards, the Illinois Association of School Administrators, the Illinois Athletic Directors Association and the North Central Association.

The IHSA also has a 35-member Legislative Commission, consisting of 21 high school principals, seven high school athletic directors elected from each of the seven state regions, and seven at-large members. The commission reviews amendment proposals to the IHSA Constitution and By-laws, and determines which are passed on to a vote of the member schools. Each school receives one vote on any amendments, with voting taking place annually in December. Changes are passed by simple majority of member schools.

[edit] History

[edit] Early Years

The IHSA was founded on December 27, 1900, at a rump session of the Illinois Principals Association. Known as the Illinois High School Athletic Association for the first 40 years of its existence, the IHSA is the second oldest of the 51 state high school associations. Only the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association outdates it, by two years.

For the greater part of a decade, the IHSA was concerned mostly with establishing school control over interscholastic athletic programs and setting eligibility standards for competition. Ringers were a persistent problem, and among schoolboy sports, football was a special concern. In this period, severe injuries and even deaths were not uncommon, and there was much talk of banning football completely.

In 1908, the IHSA’s mission expanded in an unforeseen direction when its board was convinced by Lewis Omer of Oak Park and River Forest High School to sponsor a statewide basketball tournament. Although a handful of other state associations had sponsored track meets, none had ever attempted to organize a statewide basketball tournament. The first tournament, an 11-team invitational held at the Oak Park YMCA, was a financial success. Subsequent state tournaments, which were open to all member schools, provided the IHSA with fiscal independence, an important new vehicle to spread its message, and ever-increasing name recognition among the public.

By 1922, the affairs of the Association became so time-consuming that its board hired a full-time manager, Charles W. Whitten. As vice president of the Board, Whitten had recently reorganized the basketball tournament and reduced the size of the state finals from 21 teams to four. About the same time, the IHSA became a charter member of the National Federation of State High School Associations. In addition to his IHSA responsibilities, Whitten ran the business affairs of the NFHS, at first unofficially, and after 1927 with the official title of general manager.

From this dual stage, Whitten and his assistant manager at the IHSA, H. V. Porter, exerted unusual influence over high school sports, not only in Illinois, but across the nation. In one memorable battle, Whitten took on the "grand old man" of college football, Amos Alonzo Stagg of the University of Chicago and effectively shut down his national tournament for high school basketball champions. Porter served on several NFHS committees and helped develop the molded basketball and the fan-shaped backboard, among other inventions. Porter later became the first full-time executive of the NFHS.

Of the many challenges faced by Whitten during his 20-year career, the one with the longest-lasting repercussions was the reorganization of 1940. Prior to this time, two large groups of Illinois high schools remained outside of IHSA control: private schools, which were not eligible for membership, and the public schools of Chicago, which were eligible but had joined only sporadically. The new constitution approved in 1940 extended the privileges of membership to non-public schools and gave limited autonomy to the Chicago schools, which subsequently joined en masse. In addition, non-athletic activities such as speech and music were added to the IHSA’s menu, prompting the elimination of the word “Athletic” from the Association’s name.

As the Association matured, member schools requested sponsorship of state tournaments in sports other than basketball. The first such move came in 1927, when the IHSA took over control of the Illinois Interscholastic, a festival of high school track, golf, and tennis run by the University of Illinois. The meet continued to be held on the campus in Champaign-Urbana, but as with basketball, IHSA involvement opened the field to all IHSA member schools and removed non-member schools, including a handful of out-of-state schools. The IHSA subsequently established state series in several other boys’ sports: swimming and diving (1932), wrestling (1937), baseball (1940), cross country (1946), and gymnastics (1952). Few of these series were self-supporting, but the ever-popular basketball tournament – sometimes referred to as the “goose that laid the golden egg” – paid the freight for all.

[edit] Girls’ Sports

The IHSA’s record of leadership in the field of girls’ athletics is mixed. A generation of Illinois girls have now competed in interscholastic sports with the blessing by the IHSA, but prior to 1972 opportunities for competition were severely restricted, and the attitude of the organization was indifferent, if not openly hostile, to girls’ sports.

Girls’ basketball had already begun to pervade high schools by the time the IHSA was founded in 1900. Just a few years later, upwards of 300 Illinois high schools sponsored girls’ basketball teams. For a variety of reasons, the early leaders of the IHSA found this situation unacceptable. They were worried about injuries and putting girls on public display, calling basketball “not altogether ladylike,” but they may also have been concerned about girls stealing gym time from the fledgling boys’ teams. Whatever their motives, on November 2, 1907, the IHSA Board banned all interscholastic competition for girls, becoming the first state association to do so.

Instead the IHSA, with considerable encouragement from women educators, promoted intramural activities and cooperative play days for girls. When Whitten became the director in 1921, he reached out to the Illinois League of High School Girls' Athletic Associations (ILHSGAA) and together they forged an agreement that barred girls’ teams from interscholastic competition in most sports for decades thereafter. The IHSA took over the financial support of the girls’ association in 1927 and absorbed it in 1945. The IHSA gradually relaxed its policy somewhat, allowing interschool contests for girls in some non-contact sports such as golf, tennis, and archery, but these were never popular events. To provide a small measure of competition in other sports, the IHSA sponsored “telegraphic” or “postal” competitions in basket-shooting, swimming, and bowling.

By the late 1960s Whitten and the ILHSGAA were long gone, but for the high school girls of Illinois the playing field had not changed significantly since 1907. While the IHSA was able to withstand pressure from some of its member schools to initiate meaningful interscholastics for girls, the passage of Title IX in May of 1972 finally forced the issue. The IHSA held its first girls’ state tournament in tennis that fall, and a variety of other sports quickly followed. Today the IHSA sponsors state tournaments in 14 sports for girls.

[edit] Recent Times

While the mundane tasks of regulating eligibility and licensing officials remain just as important to the IHSA’s mission as they were in the beginning, higher-profile issues having to do with state tournaments –- and who wins them –- have repeatedly stolen the spotlight in recent years.

Illinois was one of the last states, and certainly the largest, to retain a one-class system, where all schools, regardless of enrollment, competed for the same prize. In December 1970 the smaller schools, who make up the majority of IHSA members, forced a binding referendum on whether to implement a two-class system in boys’ basketball, and the measure carried by a narrow margin, 312-293. After this move, several other sports adopted the two-class format. In January 2006, after a substantial majority of schools responding to an advisory referendum indicated a preference for more classes, the IHSA Board of Directors approved expansion in several sports, starting in 2007-08.

At the culmination of the first drive for expansion, the IHSA also sought a way to add a state championship in football to its schedule of events. Because of sheer number of schools involved, an all-comers playoff was not possible. Instead the IHSA introduced in 1974 a five-class system in which teams qualified based on their regular-season performance. The addition of the football playoffs coaxed the last large group of non-members, the schools of the Chicago Catholic League, to join the IHSA. The playoffs were expanded to six classes in 1980 and eight classes in 2001.

The success of non-public schools in IHSA tournaments in recent years has led to considerable debate among the members, 83% of which are public schools. Although statistical studies seemed to indicate that as a whole non-public (and certain non-boundaried public schools) enjoyed a disproportionate amount of success, there was little agreement on the reason. In 2005, the Board of Directors implemented a multiplier for classification purposes that boosted the enrollments of non-boundaried schools by a factor of 1.65. A group of 37 private schools later sued the Association, and a settlement was reached that required the multiplier to go through the Association's annual legislative process. In December 2005, the member schools voted 450-143 to retain the 1.65 multiplier.

Another lawsuit drew national attention in the 1990s, when the IHSA laid claim to “March Madness.” The phrase was first used to describe the IHSA basketball tournament in an essay written by H. V. Porter in 1939 and published in the IHSA’s monthly magazine. Over time the phrase came to be used for high school basketball tournaments, particularly in Illinois, but it was never trademarked by the IHSA. When a television production company sought to trademark the phrase, the IHSA sued, leading to a battle that eventually involved the NCAA as well. In the end, a district court judge ruled that both the IHSA and NCAA could register the trademark and use the phrase for their own purposes.

[edit] Note

1The total of 52 counts the high school association of the District of Columbia and the two associations in Iowa, which has separate governing bodies for boys' and girls' school activities.

[edit] Executive Directors

Prior to 1991, this office was known as Manager or Executive Secretary.

  • Charles W. Whitten, 1922-1942
  • Albert Willis, 1942-1968
  • Harry Fitzhugh, 1968-1978
  • Lavere L. (Liz) Astroth, 1978-1991
  • H. David Fry, 1991-2002
  • Martin L. Hickman, 2002-present

[edit] National Hall of Fame Inductees

Twenty-two Illinoisans are members of the National High School Hall of Fame sponsored by the NFHS. The honorees, and their year of induction:

  • H. V. Porter (1982), IHSA and NFHS administrator, coined the term “March Madness”
  • Norman Geske (1982), official
  • Arthur Trout (1982), coach
  • Dwight (Dike) Eddleman (1983), athlete
  • Clifford Fagan (1983), NFHS administrator
  • Vergil Fletcher (1983), coach
  • Milton Sprunger (1983), IHSA administrator
  • Fred (Brick) Young (1983), official
  • Harold (Red) Grange (1984), athlete
  • Bart Conner (1986), athlete
  • John Griffith (1986), contributor
  • Charles Farina (1987), coach
  • Quinn Buckner (1989), athlete
  • Gordon Gillespie (1989), coach
  • Jackie Joyner-Kersee (1989), athlete
  • Keith Parker (1990), official
  • Dave Robertson (1991), coach
  • William (Red) Schmitt (1993), coach
  • Tom Frederick (1994), IHSA administrator
  • Ola Bundy (1996), IHSA administrator
  • Larry Wilcoxen (2002), official
  • Joe Newton (2004), coach

[edit] Sanctioned sports

[edit] For boys

[edit] For girls

[edit] Sanctioned non-athletic activities

Note: Some Illinois high schools field competitive teams in events such as field hockey, ice hockey, and lacrosse, but the IHSA does not sponsor tournaments in these events. In order to conduct a tournament, at least 10 percent of member schools must field teams.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  • Whitten, Charles W. Interscholastics: A Discussion of Interscholastic Contests. Chicago, 1950.
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