University Scholastic League
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| Abbreviation | UIL |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1910 |
| Type | Volunteer; NPO |
| Legal status | Association |
| Purpose | Athletic and educational |
| Headquarters | Austin, Texas |
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Region served
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 Texas Jurisdiction |
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Official language
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English |
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Executive director
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Charles Breithaupt |
| Affiliations | National Federation of State High School Associations Texas Music Educators Association Association of Texas Small School Bands Texas Education Agency |
| Website | uiltexas.org |
| Remarks | (512) 471-5883 |
The University Interscholastic League (UIL) is an organization that creates rules for and administers almost all athletic, music, and academic contests for public primary and secondary schools in the American state of Texas. It is the largest organization of its type in the world.
Activities range from American football and cross-examination debate to mathematics and marching band competitions; however, the UIL does not administer Academic Decathlon competitions.
The UIL is under the governance of the Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas. Although the Texas Education Agency governs the activities of schools and school districts in Texas, the UIL does not report to TEA, but is instead a separate entity.
The UIL was originally created by UT in 1910 as two different entities, the Debating League of Texas High Schools (to govern debating contests) and the Interscholastic Athletic Association (to govern athletic contests). The two entities merged in 1913 and adopted the UIL name.
At the time, UIL only governed white schools in Texas. From 1940 to 1970, an era of racial segregation in Texas, the Prairie View Interscholastic League (PVIL), headquartered at Prairie View A&M University, served as a separate parallel organization for African-American public high schools in Texas.
In 1965, the UIL agreed to admit PVIL member schools for competition. Black schools began UIL competitions beginning in the 1967-68 school year. After the 1969–70 school year, the UIL fully absorbed all PVIL member schools, the majority of which would later be merged with their white counterparts.
Beginning with the 2003–2004 academic year, two large all-male private schools, Dallas Jesuit and Houston Strake Jesuit, were granted UIL membership. This came after extensive court battles and negotiations from both the UIL's lawyers and the schools' joint lawyers. Previously, both schools were members of the now-defunct Texas Christian Interscholastic League (TCIL); after that league's demise and their inability to gain admittance into the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools (TAPPS) or Southwest Preparatory Conference (SPC), they decided to further pursue their decade-long battle of gaining membership into the UIL. They are so far the only private schools to be granted UIL membership, as the new UIL rules established after the Jesuit schools' entry prohibited those schools who were eligible for memberships in other similar associations (such as TAPPS or the SPC) to apply.
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