Penn also hosted a National Swimming Championship for high school boys from 1903 until the early 1920s. Into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, high school boys continued to assemble teams to compete at the Penn Relays and similar meets. At the inaugural relays in 1895, ten colleges and eight public and private high schools sent teams. The University of Pennsylvania’s Relay Carnival, a fund-raiser for its Athletic Association, became known as the Middle States Championship and had the longest influence on high school track in the area. They interacted more directly with institutions of higher education in track meets dubbed “Interscholastics.” Swarthmore College, Haverford College, West Chester Normal School, Rutgers College, Princeton University, and Delaware College all sponsored interscholastic track meets for boys. Mimicking colleges, boys formed football squads. In the late nineteenth century, college athletic programs influenced sports for both high school boys and girls. ( Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries) Influence of Colleges High school and college athletes from around the country take part in the Penn Relays, which can draw more than a hundred thousand spectators to the University of Pennsylvania each spring. Eventually, across the region schoolgirls began to compete with the same league opponents as their male counterparts. John Bonner (1890-1945), vice-rector of Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia, guided the creation of the Catholic League in 1919. A Southern New Jersey League formed by 1911, and a Camden Suburban League began in 1928. Public school boys organized the Philadelphia Public League in 1901. In 1887, student managers in Philadelphia private high schools organized the Interscholastic Academic League (Inter-Ac), the first in the nation, and area Quaker schools organized a league for Friends’ schools in 1890. Student organizers selected high schools for “league” membership in order to crown champions. While school leaders sometimes provided playing venues, students managed these nascent sports largely on their own. Contests crossed state lines to include suburban and rural opponents, public and private high schools, non-scholastic organizations, and a mix of secondary and higher educational institutions. High school boys initiated competitive basketball and tennis by the end of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, sports became part of high school life in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. In that spirit, schoolboys at Philadelphia’s Central High School played baseball in the 1860s modeled after adult clubs and football in the 1870s modeled on college programs. High school sports emerged at a time when “muscular Christianity”-which aligned physical training and manliness with the development of good morals-justified sport for shaping good habits and character of young men. As college attendance became more prevalent, high school and college sports became mutually sustaining and fortified despite the uneven opportunities of secondary schooling in the region. In the Philadelphia region, early scholastic sports gained legitimacy from mentoring provided by the area’s many colleges and from the School District of Philadelphia’s commitment to a comprehensive, exemplary program of physical education.
Originating in the nineteenth century, high school sports accompanied the spread of secondary schooling and became a nationwide phenomenon as students initiated team competitions and schools instituted physical education programs.
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