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Anyone who knows me well knows that the ICTM State High School Math Contest has been very important to me since I first participated as a freshman at Naperville North in 1991. I attended the Contest for four years as a competitor, then six years as a spectator (even though there's nothing really to watch). In 2001, the Contest moved to Urbana, and I missed the next four (the date of the Contest in 2001 was also the first, and so far only, time I've seen the New Jersey Devils play in person in New Jersey, and I am not at all sorry for missing the Contest to see my favorite team play a Stanley Cup Playoff game in their home barn). By 2005, I was a graduate student in Urbana, so I came back to the Contest, this time as a site volunteer, and very quickly as a Contest volunteer. (What's the difference? Who gives me my assignment. As a Site Volunteer, I answered to the Site Chair; now I answer to the Contest Chair.)

The impetus for this project was a comment I made after the 4AA Awards Ceremony at the 2023 Contest in Normal. From the time I first competed for Naperville North in 1991 through 2022, the Huskies had finished in the Top 4, a streak of 31 straight Contests. I wondered if that was a record. So in essence, I put together all this data just to answer the question "What is the longest streak of Top 4 team finishes?" As I was getting this data into shape to be used and rendered somehow, I coded this button to compute the length of that record streak. It said 31 (at the time), which led me to believe that the Huskies held the record. (That's actually not true, but I didn't know that until the next day.)

Idiosyncrasies

For those not familiar with the history of the Contest, I should note the following:

• The first Contest was held in 1981, and it has been held annually since.
• In 2020, the State Contest was Not Held, so there were no State Places, but the Regional Contests were held, so there were both Regional Champions and Full Team State Qualifiers; I have given all State Qualifiers credit for Participation at State in 2020.
• In 1981 and 2021, there were no separate Regional Contests, so there is no such thing in those years as a Full Team State Qualifier. In both years, Regional Champions were determined based on the State Contest, so Regional Champions do exist (so far) for every year of the Contest.
• The Contest had two Divisions (A and AA, with AA being larger schools) from the beginning through 2000. Starting in 2001, the Contest had four Divisions (but still only two sets of questions, A and AA): 1A, 2A, 3AA, and 4AA (in increasing order of school size, with 4AA being the largest schools).

What's Here?

There are JavaScript arrays that this page has loaded with basically all the Team information from the entire history of the Contest, from 1981 to the present: the list of Participating Schools for each Contest in each Division (in most years, this should mean a school qualified at least one student to compete at State), the list of Full Team Qualifiers and Regional Champion teams, and the Top 10 Schools in each Division in the final standings. Interacting with this page allows the user to read this information.

• On the left side of the page, there's a panel for school information. It can be populated by the pull-down menu or by clicking on a school name nearly anywhere else on the page (yes, including the name of the high school I mentioned above that I competed for). This will load all the information about the school that is here: how many times the school competed and placed, the best place at state, the Divisions (and names) the school competed under, and in some cases (especially for schools that no longer exist) a History Lesson.
• On the right side of the page, there are three ways of listing schools.
  • First, there's a way to list the results (State Places, Full Team Qualifiers, and Regional Champions) for a given Division and year.
  • Second, there's listing schools by rank, where the user can choose how many schools to rank (plus ties), what ranking type, and whether the schools are ranked Overall or Consecutive (e.g., State Champion - Consecutive would rank schools by the (largest) number of consecutive Contests in which they have finished first, while State Champion - Overall would rank schools by the total number of Contests in which they have finished first).
  • Third, there's a way to list all schools that meet specific other criteria, such as a school color, what city or county the school is in (Home School schools are blank for City/County), what their first or last year of competition was, or whether they have a History Lesson.

Results data is currently available through the ____ Contest.

School Sort Order: Default Name County City

School Selector

Choosing a school from the pulldown or clicking the name of a school from a Yearly Results, a Rankings, or a List of Schools will load school information below.

Include Continuity

Yearly Results

Selecting a year and Division will load results below.

Year: Division:

Rankings

Selecting a rankings type and number of teams to rank and pushing the button will load rankings below.

Rankings type:
Overall Consecutive
Number of Teams to list:

List of Schools

Choosing zero or more filter criteria and pushing the button will load the list of all schools meeting the criteria below.

Color:
County:
City/Town/Village:
First Participation Year:
Last Participation Year:
History Lesson

See here for a note about School Colors.

A word about History

I learned a lot about history and Illinois high schools as I was preparing this, and I hope you do, too. I made a decision (detailed in the Notes) that I was going to treat schools that consolidated or split as separate schools as best I could.

• If a school absorbed another school, or split off another school, but did not change its name, I have treated it as the same school. Examples include St. Viator when it merged with Sacred Heart of Mary, Normal Community when Normal Community West opened, and Libertyville when Vernon Hills opened.
• If a school absorbed another school, or split off another school, and did change its name, I have treated it as a different school. Examples include the merger of Academy/Spalding and Bergan to form Peoria Notre Dame, the consolidation of Gibson City and Melvin-Sibley to form Gibson City-Melvin-Sibley, and the renaming of Grayslake to Grayslake Central when Grayslake North opened.
• If a school changed its name, but I can find evidence that it was not in conjunction with a change in its student cohort (i.e., the school the next year was functionally the same school as the previous year), I have treated it as the same school. Examples include McLeansboro becoming Hamilton County, Hancock County becoming Carthage (again), and Wheaton Central becoming Wheaton Warrenville South.

I have compiled some combined listings for schools that were affected in this way. For example, if Warren and United are considered to be the same school (United is the successor school to a consolidation involving Warren), they would have competed every year in the history of the Contest, but since the school changed after the 2004 Contest, it is listed here as 24 years for Warren and then separately United after that. Similarly but in the opposite direction, if Lincoln-Way and Lincoln-Way Central are considered to be the same school (the school was renamed after Lincoln-Way East opened as a four-year school in 2001, but it's some of the same students and in the same building), the Knights would have competed every year of the Contest. So there are things that look a little off because of splits and consolidations, the most obvious of which is that New Trier only has seven straight titles, not eight, because the first one is attributed to New Trier East.

These combined listings can be found by enabling the "Include Continuity" checkbox above. A word of warning: some Rankings appear duplicated if Continuity is on, as for example "New Trier West/New Trier" and "New Trier East/New Trier" are listed separately as having competed in every Contest, and "New Trier" has one fewer. While I could remove siblings and predecessors/successors from the rankings, that creates a bigger problem where Libertyville and Vernon Hills could not both appear in the Rankings, even though both won all their State Championships after the schools split.

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Compiling this data was a weeks-long project. Thanks are due to Carol Nenne and Jim Aiu for (perhaps unwittingly) giving me access to all the scanned compiled results, from which I was able to pull what I wanted. Also thanks are due to those who compiled the results in the first place, including J. Peter Westergard, Eric Easterberg, Richard C. Muller, Roger A. Finnell, and Ron Vavrinek.

I wrote some Notes as I was working on all this, if you are interested in my process.

As I said in the Notes, many of the History Lessons (and I need to write more of those) come from the fine site illinoishighschoolglorydays.com and its predecessor site leopardfan.tripod.com.

If you like this, if you don't like it, if you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know! I would like this project to be as useful as possible, and I'd be happy to receive feedback.