Ches-Mont League

The Ches-Mont League is a high school sports league primarily located in Chester County, Pennsylvania in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Currently, the league consists of fourteen high schools, divided into two divisions. Thirteen of the schools are from Chester County, with one from Delaware County.

The schools all compete in varsity high school sports in the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association, or the PIAA. Ches-Mont League teams compete in District One, at the AAAA, AAA and AA levels.

The Ches-Mont League started in 1950 as a spin-off from the huge Suburban League, which had been home for the larger schools in Chester County for some time. All of the new league's charter members either were in Chester County or in Montgomery County municipalities bordering the Schuylkill River, thus the "Ches-Mont" name. Eight schools originally comprised the league, only one of which, Coatesville, is still part of the league today, though two other original members have split into smaller high schools (Downingtown and West Chester). The other five charter members were Bridgeport, which closed in 1966; Phoenixville; Pottstown; Spring City, which later merged with Royersford High School and became Spring-Ford; and Tredyffrin-Easttown, which later became Conestoga.

By 1960, the Ches-Mont had grown to 10 members by dropping smaller schools and adding newly consolidated high schools that had become too large for the small-school Inter-County League. In 1968, Conestoga joined nine former Suburban League schools in the new Central League. During the 1970s, West Chester opened a second high school; also, the league accepted its first non-public school member, St. Pius X of Pottstown, so that by the end of the decade, the Ches-Mont League had an unwieldy 12 schools playing in only one division.

By the middle of the 1980s, the great disparity in size between the largest and smallest schools became much more pronounced with the growth of classification-based postseason play. The Ches-Mont League could not agree on how to create relief for the situation, so the smaller, more rural, schools took matters into their own hands. In the fall of 1985, five Ches-Mont schools, including charter members Phoenixville and Pottstown, announced that they were joining with two smaller Bux-Mont League schools and Lansdale Catholic of the Bicentennial Athletic League to form the new Pioneer Athletic Conference, which started league play in 1986.

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