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14. New National Governance and the Triumph of the State High School Associations
- Syracuse University Press
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292 14 New Nat io nal Gov er nanc e and t he Tr iumph of t he St at e Hig h Sch o ol As so c iat io ns The great expansion of interscholastic sports into a national scope during the 1920s was exhilarating to many fans of sports and helped immensely in making high school sports a major audience draw during the decade. But like the overheated economy of the 1920s, it was set to crash just like the stock market of October 1929. The crash for national tournaments came the following year, fueled by several years of opposition that had been building to a boil from high school educators who saw the increasing aggrandizement and commercialization of high school sports as eroding the educational and character-building mission of high school sports. In 1927 Charles W. Whitten of Illinois became secretary-treasurer of the fast-rising National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations, headquartered in Chicago. He launched a relentless campaign that would dramatically change the governance of interscholastic sports in the next several years. The high school athletic world would soon come to reflect the assertion of authority by secondary-school administrators as they moved in their final search for control to place high school interscholastic competition into a realm deemed appropriate to the overall mission of the secondary-school educational system. The system that had existed since the early 1900s—where colleges and universities took the responsibility of sponsoring many high school contests, particularly in swimming, track and field, and tennis—would soon come apart. The foundation for this change was the emergence of state athletic associations and their coming together in a national New National Governance ✦ 293 organization. Most of these state associations were built in sponsorship of basketball tournaments, but their aim was to take control of all high school sports and expel the universities and colleges out of the high school athletics business. The growth of state associations had been steady the previous two decades. By 1920 all the states in the Midwest had organizations that sponsored and governed interscholastic athletics. The colleges and universities at this time, as was abundantly evident, were vigorously sponsoring interscholastic contests in such sports as basketball, track and field, swimming, golf, and tennis, and their involvement was growing year by year toward a more commercial approach, one that was becoming larger and more national in scope. The members of the state associations (educators in the schools) were looking at these developments with increasing displeasure. At this time, L. W. Smith of the Illinois High School Athletic Association believed that a broader organization that crossed state boundaries was needed to deal with what were perceived as problems in college and university sponsorship of interscholastic athletic events. In the spring of 1920, Smith called together representatives of other state organizations in Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin to a meeting in Chicago. The report of the first meeting provided the reason for their coming together: “The particular reason that brought the officials together was the fact that high school athletics were being handled in an unsatisfactory manner in contests under the auspices of colleges and universities .” The organization took the name “Midwest Federation of State High School Athletic Associations,” and the first rules it adopted were intended to assert the new organization’s power. The federation insisted on a prohibition on member schools from sending teams to interstate meets not sanctioned by a board of control in the meet’s home state and a corollary prohibition on any player competing in such meets who was ineligible to compete in his home state.1 The second year’s meeting of the Midwest Federation in Chicago represented a rocky start for the organization, as only four states sent representatives —Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Indiana chose to drop out. After Smith beat the bushes for greater participation, the Midwest Federation saw a leap to eleven member states in its third meeting, in [3.80.211.101] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:51 GMT) 294 ✦ Triumph of National Governance, 1920–1930 Chicago, in March 1922, adding Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Ohio. When the states of Maine, Oklahoma , Kentucky, and Mississippi sent representatives to the fourth annual meeting in Cleveland in 1923, the federation decided that even though it had a membership of only fifteen state organizations, a name change was needed to reflect its new national presence, so it became the “National Federation...