National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament
From Hoopedia
Contents |
Beginnings in 1917
Amos Alonzo Stagg organized the National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament (NIBT), which brought the top public high school teams in the country to Chicago for a single-elimination tournament. The first tournament was held in 1917. It ran annually then, from 1920 to 1931.
Basketball by the 1920s was played by more high schools than any other sport, and it was the often the genesis in the formation of many state high school associations, which were formed to regulate basketball. While football had a long history of intersectional competition prior to the 1920s, basketball did not. However, it would soon surpass football in terms of intersectional interest, mostly as a result of the National Basketball Interscholastic that was played in Chicago from 1917 to 1930. In March, 1917 the athletic director and coach at University of Chicago, Amos Alonzo Stagg, inaugurated an interscholastic tournament that would be played in the school's Bartlett gymnasium. Because the tourney involved schools throughout the Midwest in its first year, it was called the Central States championship after an earlier tournament of the same name. The tourney had 23 schools, 12 from Illinois, both public and private. Evanston (IL) won the first tournament.
Tournament Designated National in 1921
World War I interrupted the tournament, but it returned in 1920, but as an all-public school meet. The press gave little attention to the Stagg interscholastic, as the University of Chicago treated it as a “curtain raiser” for the Chicago-Pennsylvania game, which was deemed to be for the national collegiate basketball title. The following year Stagg designated his meet as a "national" tournament," although most of the teams were from the Midwest. Seven of the 26 team entries came from the East, which gave the tournament somewhat of a national flavor. There were not yet any entries from the South and only one entry from the West. The members of the winning team received gold watches, and members of the second, third, and fourth place teams received gold, silver, and bronze charms, a bit of “professionalism” that was probably not too pleasing to some educators.
The tournament organizers soon discovered a problem in attracting teams, as the second week in March conflicted with the ongoing state tournaments in many areas of the country. Passaic High of New Jersey, which was fast garnering a national reputation as the "Wonder Teams" that would put coach Ernest Blood in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, seriously wanted to test themselves in the national tourney, but the dates for its state tournament were in conflict, and the school had to turn down Stagg’s invitation. In later years, Passaic could not consider the invitation because of its state rules against post-season competition.
In 1922 Stagg wisely moved his tournament to the first week in April, and the later date allowed for invitations to state championship teams. The tournament featured 32 entries, which included twelve state champs, and the press coverage grew a bit more extensive, in which the championship game result was given a banner headline and a bit more ink.
Tournament Truly National by 1923
With the 1923 tournament, Stagg had achieved his objective of featuring a tournament truly national in scope. The meet featured 40 teams from 24 states—14 teams representing the West, seven from the South, and six from the East. The Chicago Tribune celebrated this achievement by publishing a huge map of the United States, showing lines leading from the entry locations to Chicago, and captioning the image “All Basketball Paths Lead to Chicago.” The five-day tournament was broadcast on the new medium of radio, and certain games were filmed by “movie men.” Newspapers across the country gave coverage to the tournament, most remarkably even in states and cities that had no entries, such as New York and Los Angeles, both whose hometown newspapers gave daily reports. Stagg’s National Interscholastic had become the equivalent of the NCAA tournament of a half century later. There was no collegiate national tournament during the 1920s. Because of state and local prohibitions by high school athletic associations in certain states, the tournament could not be all-inclusive. The basketball hotbed of Indiana after 1922 prohibited its teams from participating, and the states of New York, New Jersey (with the great Passaic High teams), and California never sent representatives.
Each year the tournament received more and more coverage in the newspapers so that by the late 1920s the five-day event was garnering inch-high banner headlines across the top of the sport pages almost daily. In 1927 of the 43 entrants 33 were state champions. Ironically, the Illinois champion, Mt. Carmel, elected not to appear that year, and Morton High of Cicero, one of ten schools not to have won a state title, won the national championship. Stagg usually invited the Public League and Suburban League champions, and Morton was entered by virtue of it winning the Suburban League that year. Chicago area schools largely ignored the state tourney, which was considered largely a preserve of downstate schools, to participate in the Stagg meet.
For most of its history, the National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament excluded parochial and private schools, and never invited any predominantly Black northern school or segregated Black Southern or border state school to participate. Thus excluded from the mainstream of interscholastic competition these groups went on to create parallel tournaments that could showcase their high school athletes in a national forum. (See the article on the National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament for Black Schools.)
By 1928, the National Federation of High School Athletic Associations was questioning the sponsorship of national meets by universities, and some members asked for an investigation. What came out the 1928 meeting was not an investigation, but a poll. The secretary-treasurer of the Federation at the time, Charles Whitten, of Illinois, sent out a questionnaires to each state association. Eight state associations had already voted in opposition to the national tournament, and no ballots were distributed in those states. Fifteen states ignored the poll, either out of hostility or indifference. But Whitten got participation from 23 state associations, who sent out the poll material from the principals. A total return from the principals was 2,334 votes, of which 1,350 of them opposed the tournament and 984 favored the tournament. However, only five of the 23 states had returned majorities in favor of the tournament, and they were Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas, and South Dakota. The South in the later years of the tournament was the strongest bastion of support of the tournament and the poll reflected that sentiment.
National High School Federation Resolution Against Stagg Tourney 1929
The results of the poll were presented to the National Council of the Federation in 1929, in Cleveland, and out of that meeting the members passed a resolution that the NFSHAA would refuse to sanction any “interstate basketball tournaments,” which passed 20 to 2. All colleges, high schools, athletic clubs, and other organizations conducting such tournaments were urged to discontinue the practice.
The resolution severely crippled the Stagg tournament, as state associations responded by withdrawing their support. The 1930 tournament therefore was a much diminished affair, attracting only 25 teams. In the South, however, most of the state associations continued to support the tourney, either because they were non-federation members or had simply chosen to defy the national organization. Of the total entries more than half, 13, were from the South (including three teams from Texas), five were from the West, three from the East, and only four from the Midwest. The lone Illinois entry was Morgan Park, the second place team in the Chicago Public League. In deference to their Southern invitees, Stagg officials chose not to invite the all-black Chicago Phillips (IL) team, which had won the Public League title, to ensure the participation of the southern teams. Stagg also filled out the field with private, parochial, and military academies, institutions that had been excluded in previous years.
North Central Association Delivers Coup de Grace on Stagg Tourney 1930
At this point the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools delivered the coup de grace. At its March 1930 meeting, the organization responded to its own comprehensive report on the tournament, as well as to a presentation by Whitten strongly condemning interstate tournaments. The North Central recognized that by this time the high school interschool athletics were now under the governance of strong local state athletic associations that offered “completely adequate programs of interscholastic competition,” and that college sponsorship was not only unnecessary, but opened the door to evils. Critics of national tournaments believe one evil was that they served as “bright colored cloaks for organized moves to recruit prep athletes.” The North Central Association issued a resolution designed to “discourage” all member institutions from sponsoring high school meets, unless invited to by a state association. The resolution was viewed as a threat to expel any members who sponsored a meet without a state association invitation. Such a situation existed in Illinois, where the IHSAA conducted a state track meet in conjunction with the University of Illinois.
The Chicago Tribune was a strong supporter of the Stagg Tournament, and conducted its own poll of Midwestern states, with the help of allied newspapers in each respective state. The Tribune poll, which was designed to produce a favorable result, found that eight of the 12 states supported the tournament, and only four opposed. Most support came from the border states—Kentucky, Kansas, and Oklahoma—and from the smaller more rural schools.
The powerful Tribune sports columnist Arch Ward spoke scathingly of the movement to end collegiate sponsorship of high school athletics, saying: “Not long ago high schools were clamoring for the assistance of colleges and universities in promoting athletics. Probably no high school in the country was giving proper athletic training in any considerable number of boys in the days when the colleges first lent a helping hand. The colleges perhaps had two thoughts in mind. First, they could help to develop athletics in their own section, and second, they would do a bit of legitimate advertising. Now it seems the officers of certain state high school associations suggest that high schools no longer need the assistance of colleges.”
The University of Chicago investigated, conducting a poll of principals whose high schools had participated in the tournament the previous ten years. They found, probably much to their surprise, that 89 opposed and only 30 supported the meet. In December 1930, the university, bowing to the inevitable and the consensus of opinion, elected to terminate the tournament.
Tournament Champions
1917 Evanston (Illinois)
1918 --no meet--
1919 --no meet--
1920 Wingate (Indiana)
1921 Cedar Rapids (Iowa)
1922 Lexington (Kentucky)
1923 Kansas City Wyandotte (Kansas)
1924 Windsor (Colorado)
1925 Wichita (Kansas)
1926 Fitchburg (Massachusetts)
1927 Cicero Morton (Illinois)
1928 Ashland (Kentucky)
1929 Athens (Texas)
1930 Athens (Texas)
