That all ended when the Varsity Boys Basketball team of 1953 won the Wayland Academy Holiday Tournament and accepted the trophy. Mac McCarty was a young coach at the time and allowed the team to accept the trophy but did not initially tell found Headmaster Perry Dunlap Smith (also known as PDS) that he had. Apparently when PDS found out, there was some discussion on the matter and, I believe, due to Mac's considerable ability to sway people, PDS conceded on the championship trophy stand. From that point forward the school accepted trophies, and there are quite a few in the basement of the Mac Gym.
I imagine because of the fact that these trophies tend to collect dust around campus, some time in the early 1980's the Independent School League decided to acknowledge championships with clothe banners. When I arrived in 1994 we had a number of banners on the south wall of the Mac Gym, and we bought a new banner every time we won a championship. The problem in 1994 was, we were in a dry spell of championships.
At the time I was hired, we also hired a new admission director named Greg O'Melia. Greg used to come into the gym and tell me that we needed more banners on the wall. Many other schools in our league had one banner per sport and added a year when the team won a conference title. But we did not have many championship seasons, so Greg thought (and others then agreed) that we ought to have a new banner every time we won a conference championship. We even acknowledged JV Championships that the league itself did not. When we won a banner, it was a really big deal. We used to have and unveiling of the new banner in front of the whole school.
About 10 years ago, we moved out of our championship drought and two things happened. We couldn't really fit any more single championship banners on the wall, and some people started feeling that the banner unveilings were disruptive to other assemblies. I began to combine championships onto single banners per sport and put them up when it was best for our crew to set up the scaffolding.
In 2006 the IHSA state tournaments also changed. Previous to that year, all state tournaments were either 1 or 2 classes except for football. In a 1 or 2 class system a school of no more than 200 students enrolled struggled to even compete at the regional level. But starting in 2006, IHSA tournaments gradually expanded classes. Now Baseball, Basketball and Volleyball compete in a four class system and Golf Cross Country, Soccer and Track & Field compete in three class systems. In 2009, we won our first Regional Championships in Girls Basketball, Girls Soccer and Golf. And within several years, we had won Sectional and now won and placed high in State Championships.
Coaches, athletes and parents kept on asking how are you going to acknowledge these new championships. We did not have the room in the gym, we needed a plan for future championships, and the clothe banners themselves had begun to look dusty and wrinkled from years on the wall. As well we realized we had not acknowledged previous Independent School League championships to the early 1980's when the banner era began.
That leads me today. After investigating a variety of alternatives to address our championship acknowledgements, today new banners were hung on the wall. They were made by Neff Company and they are now vinyl not cloth. The vinyl allows for brighter more vibrant colors, and it does not show the dirt. Best there is a banner for every sport and each banner has room for all conference, regional, sectional, and state championships and room to grow. We acknowledge our oldest ISL Conference title (1967 Baseball) and our latest regional title (Boys Soccer 2012). In Football we have the opportunity to list all eleven times we have qualified for the state playoffs.
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Although there is a picture above, drop by this week and take a look at the south wall. I am pleased with the look and the opportunities it gives us to both acknowledge the past and motivate our athletes and coaches for the future.
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