Historic KCI Sports: What Were They Like?

Written by: Sophie Karigiannis

Picture this; you're trying out, practicing, preparing for games, and competing in KCI athletics. But it's the year 1925. What were KCI athletics like way back then? 

First of all, as you might guess, athletics weren't even available for girls if you go far back enough in the KCI athletics timeline, so that already makes it hard to picture for about half the athletes here at KCI. However, gender equality in sports wasn't the only thing that was different in the past. The differences range from the schools KCI competed against, to the jerseys, and all the way to sports that were offered.

Some of the big names that KCI rivals as of 2025 are schools like WCI and BCI (while it depends on the sport), but some of these schools weren't even around not too long ago for us to compete against. Schools like WCI and Eastwood have been around for a while, while schools like Laurel Heights (formerly SJAM) and Huron Heights have just been introduced to the community in the last 25 years. KCI could not have, as it did not yet exist, play against Huron until 2006. 

As we all know, KCI is by far one of the oldest high schools in the area, but it took a whole 100 years for any of the other neighbouring schools to join KCI. (The second oldest school in our community is Eastwood, est. 1956). That would definitely make playing against other schools hard, right? Well, in 1855 until 1876, KCI didn't really have any athletics. This was because KCI wasn't situated where it stands right now—it was packed on a street further downtown in Kitchener. The earliest records of a physical education class show signs of taking place in the 1880s, and when competitive athletics first took off, KCI would have faced Catholic schools, Galt Collegiate Institute (GCI, est. 1852), and travelled to Toronto and even further beyond to play tournaments.

So, now that we're far enough on the timeline to actually have competitive sports, which ones were offered? Sports like basketball, volleyball, soccer, and track and field were all offered back then. A fun note to add is that "track and field" was more commonly known as "field and track.” Additionally, while KCI has many accomplished and impressive track champions these days, in the 1900s there were as few as seven to eight track champions for the whole school. Some sports that existed back then that no longer exist at KCI are sports like tumbling and cheerleading. According to Mr. Bowman, cheerleading was actually primarily a male sport when it first began. After that, sometime in the early 1920s, it shifted to being a female focused sport, and nowadays it is mostly split. 

Lacrosse was also around a lot back then, if not as a high school sport then something the community enjoyed. Though it just recently started back up as a spring sport at KCI, it was very popular in the 1900s and possibly even earlier. The Clocktower Commons Area in Victoria Park, which used to be a sports stadium, was where many teams would play lacrosse on a regular basis. 

Hockey was offered, though the sport would have surely looked much different. KCI is  fortunate to have an arena right next door, while years and years ago the school would not have had that privilege. The Don McLaren Arena was only built after World War II, that's almost 100 years after KCI was first established in the area. 

And out of those sports that were around, which one was the most popular and big at KCI? Right now, the biggest sports at KCI is a topic highly debated. For instance, the Rugby teams consistently have a great turnout each year (even in the early years! [Photo 1]), and it is one of KCI’s most highly achieving sports. Football has always had a great high school culture, and track and field is a lot of students' personal favourite. However, and this might surprise you, the most popular and prominent sport all those years ago was soccer. Soccer was huge, and when anyone mentioned "football,” you could probably guess they were talking about soccer, not American football. In fact, football only really took off after the Super Bowl first started (after World War II), making American football a recent household name. 

In fact, soccer was not just important to KCI, KCI was important to soccer. KCI alumni David Forsyth played on the soccer teams at KCI and went on to later become a semi-pro. He is "credited as being one of the founders of modern soccer in Canada's history", as spoken by Mr. Bowman. David Forsyth is remembered as the "Father of Canadian Soccer". (Photo 2)

You can read more about David Forsyth here and here. 

So you've made the team, and now you're beginning to practice. What does that look like? Something obvious would surely be the jerseys. Basketball shorts, even for boys, were known to be quite short in the 1900s, notably in the 70s and 80s, while girls often had to cover up, even for sweat-inducing athletics, in woolen cardigans and leggings. This was not the case too often, yet was still a sizeable difference. Another thing to add was that there was less safety equipment for football. Players wore lighter pads and leather helmets, like the one in the photo below (Photo 3). 

As you can see, sports would have been so much different back in the early years of our school compared to now. In some ways, sports would have been more challenging and with less of a community, but in other ways, sports were just as celebrated as they are today. Finally, as seen by our own personal KCI alumni sports celebrity, KCI was always high-achieving in athletics—no matter what they looked like.