Chicago Athletic Association Football team

The Chicago Athletic Association was an American football team, based in Chicago, Illinois. The club itself had been organized in 1890, and in 1892 it formed a football team. The team was built around veterans of Chicago's University Club football team.

The University Club football team was the first-rate team produced by the city, because Illinois and Northwestern were still years away from being respective, and Amos Alonzo Stagg would not form the University of Chicago's program until 1892.

Chicago society therefore needed a team to represent the city in annual Thanksgiving Day games, and from 1888 to 1891 they created the University Club team and had it compete against either Michigan or Cornell each year. The University Club team was made up of recent college graduates, whose families were from Chicago but who were products of east coast football programs.

In 1892 the Chicago A. A. football team not only took over the primer football role of the University Club team. It built a program of playing a season-long schedule of university and club teams. That team included at least eight names from the 1891 University Club team, and added the great Yale star Pudge Heffelfinger to the line-up. The 1893 team featured Heffelfinger, Yale halfback, Laurie Bliss, and five players from the University Club.

In 1893 at the Chicago's World Fair, the Chicago A. A. played one of the very first night football games against West Point (the earliest being on September 28, 1892 between Mansfield State Normal and Wyoming Seminary). Chicago won the game 14-0. The game lasted only 40 minutes, compared to the normal 90 minutes.

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