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Team Players

By Kerry A. White

Foul. That's how historians sum up high school sports in the early 1900s, when students, outsiders, and above all, chaos, governed the games. Before school officials took control, competition was virtually unstructured. There were few eligibility requirements for players, inadequate rules to ensure fair play, and scant or no precautions taken to safeguard athletes.

Nothing barred coaches--often school alumni or students from nearby colleges--from playing on the teams they coached, and no rules stopped outsiders, including older, paid athletes, from joining in especially fierce competitions. With few safety measures in place, thousands of preventable injuries and numerous deaths befell high school athletes each year.

"In the first decade of this century, there were some very, very unsavory things going on in high school sports," says Dick Kishpaugh, a sports historian and...