Posted 8/6/25 10:20 pm
It’s the halfway point of no-contact week! It’s good to see teams doing team stuff. Remember, this week’s only restriction is that you can’t be coached by your coach for your competition season choreo. Anything else is pretty much wide open, unless your district shuts down all athletics and activities for the week (which isn’t that common). So I’ve seen Illinois teams at their freshman orientations and welcome days, for example. In the past I’ve seen fundraisers, team bonding, and band + poms on-field rehearsals.
Quick pom tosses:
Can we please get some decent air quality? For northern and central Illinois, it’s been like 7 days of unhealthy air thanks to Canadian wildfires. Hopefully your practices were indoors late last week.
Shout outs to all the college teams back in action, presumably working on their gameday stuff. I saw Minnesota posted a fun skills alphabet video. Speaking of MN Dance, I saw that Mattoon Varsity Wavette Arely attended the U of M’s summer intensive–such a cool opportunity!
It’s never too early to formulate your comp season schedule, and Wheaton Warrenville South is letting ya know that their comp runs on January 11th.
Deep dive / deep plie:
Y’all know I like history, but I was always on the fence about IHSA’s school name system. On one hand, I kind of secretly like the old-fashioned officialness of how they would formally designate schools.
Warning: social studies and/or trivia content!
So the formula has always been TOWN + (SCHOOL NAME IF DIFFERENT FROM TOWN). For example: DOWNERS GROVE (NORTH), AND ALTON (MARQUETTE). This is how schools are listed in IHSA records, on sectional and state schedules and results, in their directory, and in their website’s Score Zone feature during playoffs.
Clunky for sure. But I somewhat like it because it gets at the history of how schools and districts evolved over time.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was a new concept for each town to have a high school. That seems to be the origins of the IHSA name format — a town and its high school were one and the same.
So it’s a pretty straightforward format that works great for simple cases. In the screenshot farther down the page, you’ll see that Oak Forest doesn’t have any added details. It’s just Oak Forest, since there aren’t other high schools in the town. But in IHSA record-keeping, that Oak Forest name really means, “Oak Forest’s high school.”
If there was any complicating factor — like a name that wasn’t the same as the town, they introduced the parentheses part of the name format that we’ve all seen on IHSA printed material.
One of those situations that called for parentheses were schools that served not only towns but the surrounding countryside–so-called “area” or “community” high schools (quick examples include Geneva, York, Normal, and Normal West — and sometimes they still go by “community” in the name today). Sometimes these kinds of “beyond just the town” schools were organized by township…so you get Warren, Leyden, and Thornton, for example (official IHSA names: GURNEE (WARREN), FRANKLIN PARK (LEYDEN), and HARVEY (THORNTON TWP.)).
The system was kind of future-proof, too. By the mid-20th century when some towns opened a second high school, the naming system seemed pretty functional; you’d get IHSA names like NAPERVILLE (CENTRAL) and NAPERVILLE (NORTH).
But if the two new schools didn’t go by a town’s name, it started to get a little clumsy:. A classic example is District 87’s schools — here’s the evolution:
— –The O.G. castle on the hill: Glen Ellyn Community High School was listed, in IHSA records, simply as GLEN ELLYN.
— –When it split into two in the ‘50s to serve the two towns, it got its new district name of Glenbard, an iffy mashup of Glen Ellyn and Lombard. IHSA sports records would use GLEN ELLYN (GLENBARD WEST) and LOMBARD (GLENBARD EAST).
Again, it’s TOWN + (ACTUAL NAME for clarification), with the translation being, “Lombard’s high school (but here’s the actual name on the side of the building).”
SUMMIT (ARGO) follows the formula but it looks that way for a different reason. The backstory there is that the historical town of Argo no longer exists, but the school kept the name. Which is great, because they get to be the Argonauts and not the…Summiteers? Mountain Climbers?
So, yeah, the parentheses are handy. You can see Lyons Township’s official IHSA name in the screenshot, which honors both the town and the school name. At the very least, this format helps you figure out where a school is…like LISLE (BENET) and WILMETTE (LOYOLA ACADEMY).
On the other hand, the format was sometimes silly. I mean, that naming formula just never worked great for Chicago schools. You can see that in the screenshot for the 1A sectional field. The system literally tried to conceptualize it as, “Chicago’s high school, but the one that’s named DuSable.”
Then you also got plainly weird and cumbersome names like WHEATON (WHEATON WARRENVILLE SOUTH). Across town, it was just WHEATON (NORTH).
And then there were IHSA names that no one says or writes, like LISLE (SR.).
Ok, so I definitely poked fun at this system over the years, while also kind of liking it. So props (kind of?) to IHSA for their new school-name format, which you can check out on their redesigned website. Now schools are listed by their real-life, normal names. But for fans of the weird and intriguing old system, you can still find Fieldcrest under both the F and M sections of their directory (M for Minonk).
A few kinks have to be worked out. While it’s nice to find Fieldcrest in both F and M, Fenton is only listed under F but not also B (Bensenville). Bremen’s got a similar issue. But you can find Metea Valley under both M and A (Aurora). Yet Lincoln-Way East is found under L, but not F (Frankfort).
Given THAT, I don’t even want to check the competitive dance records section…I’ll give them some time to iron out the wrinkles.
Today’s random pic: After about 12 hours of routines, here’s just one section of the floor during awards at IDTA state on February 15, 2025 in Springfield. Yup, I sat at that scorer’s table for the whole event, besides a couple bathroom and snack trips!
