On 12/29/2025 at 8:27 PM, Ordell said:

Owensboro and Bryan Station are the only teams not from Jefferson County to have won the tourney multiple times. Anybody know how many times Owensboro played in the L.I.T?!?!

That would likely take a gooood bit of leg-work for anyone to look that up.

The LIT was started as a Louisville-centric tournament, and they seem to have really stuck hard to that premise in recent years. In 2023, 2024 & 2025 I know the final fields of qualifying teams were exclusively comprised of Jefferson County teams....I can't say for sure whether or not they were including Oldham and Bullitt County teams in the SETH Ratings to qualify for the tournament those years, but as successful as North Oldham's basketball program has been in recent years I have a hard time thinking that they wouldn't have been in the top local competition to qualify for the LIT, so I would assume those years were Jefferson County teams only.

2022 included Bullitt Central, 2021 included Bullitt East & North Bullitt, 2020 included North Bullitt, 2019 included Bullitt Central, 2018 included Bullitt East, 2017 included Bullitt East, 2016 included North Bullitt, 2015 included Bullitt East & North Bullitt, 2014 included Bullitt East, 2013 was all Jefferson County teams....it looks like you'd have to go back a decent way to get back to the era where they were inviting anyone outside of the Louisville area to take part in the LIT.

On 1/5/2018 at 10:32 AM, Smallhoops said:

Held annually since 1948, the LIT is Kentucky’s oldest regular season high school basketball tournament and has evolved into a true city championship for teams in the Sixth and Seventh Regions.

The LIT was started by Louisville high schools because of a dispute with the All-Kentucky Conference, a state-wide conference that initially was made up of 16 of the largest high schools in Kentucky. Male, Manual and St. Xavier, the three public and parochial high schools then located in Louisville, were members of the All-Kentucky Conference. Starting in 1940, Male hosted the All-Kentucky Conference basketball tournament to which 8 teams from the Conference were invited. Flaget High School opened in the mid-40’s and, by 1947, was perhaps the best team in Louisville, but Flaget was not allowed to participate in the All-Kentucky Conference tournament because it was not a member of the Conference. As the other three Louisville schools wanted to participate in a tournament that included Flaget, those four then–existing Louisville schools (Male, Manual, St. X and Flaget) started the LIT as an alternative to the All-Kentucky Conference tournament.

The initial concept was that the LIT would be an 8-team tournament, comprised of the four Louisville schools, two teams from Jefferson County, and two teams from elsewhere in the state.

I figured I'd expand a little bit on the early history that @Smallhoops gave in his own history lesson from the first post....

So around the turn of the 20th century, football and basketball were both relatively new sports but were catching on quickly. The first game of American football was played in November 1869, and basketball was invented by Dr. James Naismith in December 1891. As the sports were catching on around the country and in Kentucky high schools, the rules of the games (many of which seem completely standardized in the minds of today’s sports fans) were also still evolving, along with the rules of baseball, as well. For example:

- In 1901 Major League Baseball introduced its rule that all foul balls not caught on the fly would be counted as strikes until the batter had two strikes, and two years later in 1903 they standardized the height of pitcher’s mounds to no more than 15-inches above the height of the base lines.

- In 1904 the National Football League elected to change from awarding 5-points for a successful field goal kick to 4-points, and then in 1909 they elected to drop the point value to 3 for each successful field goal kick.

- The NFL adopted the forward pass in 1906.

- In the early winter of 1909 the Amateur Sports Federation (the organization which Dr. James Naismith had charged with governing the rules of his game of basketball) decided to both approve the use of glass for basketball backboards, as well as ruling that a player would be disqualified from the remainder of a basketball game after committing their 4th personal foul in the game.

With such rapid and significant changes developing for the games their teams were playing, college and high school teams playing around the turn of the century would often have lengthy exchanges between coaches and athletic directors to agree on the rules they would be playing by prior to inking final game contracts and playing their games. Additional to that, complaints from fans and coaches frequently popped up newspaper reports covering prominent games about rumors of “ringer” players showing up on gamedays to play for the winning teams. So with the intent of both standardizing gameplay and standardizing students’ eligibility to participate in athletic events, a group of representatives from several schools in western Kentucky created the Western Kentucky Athletic Association in the spring of 1911. Then 3-1/2 years later a group of schools from central Kentucky created their own Central Kentucky High School Athletic Association. Then fast-forward two and a half years to the annual meeting of the Kentucky Educational Association in April of 1917, and the Kentucky High School Athletic Association was officially created with 18 charter member schools. A second association, the Kentucky Interscholastic Association, was also created at the KEA's spring 1917 meeting. The KIA was comprised of 8 larger schools from around the state, and membership in the KHSAA and KIA was not mutually exclusive - four of the KIA's eight charter members were also charter members of the KHSAA.

The Kentucky Interscholastic Association was established largely with the intent of organizing football around the state, with most of the organized high school football programs at that time existing only at larger schools. At the time of their conception, neither the KHSAA nor the KIA extended membership to private schools, but in 1920 they expanded to include private school membership. In the years to come, KIA schools all eventually joined into the KHSAA, and as the KHSAA began creating conferences around the state - most of which were organized solely on a geographical basis - the larger teams from the KIA were reorganized into a sixteen team "All-Kentucky Conference," which was comprised of some of the largest and most prominent high school sports programs around the Commonwealth.

In 1940 the All-Kentucky Conference held its first winter tournament in Louisville. Almost from the get-go there were some complaints about how the tournament was organized. The tournament's 8-team field was established by selecting the top 8 teams from the conference according to their Dickinson System ratings. One of the significant flaws of the Dickinson System was its reliance on teams' overall winning percentages to calculate its ratings. This was problematic because with the difficulties of weather and travel impacting governing most of the teams' schedules in the early 1940's, there were arguments about how winning percentages should be calculated when some basketball teams would have already played a dozen or more games prior to tournament ratings being calculated, while other teams would sometimes only have played 5 or 6 games prior to the tournament ratings being calculated and released.

In the 5 or 6 years to follow the inaugural AKC Tournament, there were coaches calling for the tournament to begin including strong teams from non-conference schools, while others felt there was no need to invite non-conference schools to compete in what had clearly been created as a conference-exclusive tournament. Further issues arose in 1946 when the member schools of the Western Kentucky Conference (a conference established by the KHSAA and frequently known as the "Little Sixteen") began talks of establishing their own February basketball tournament. The Western Kentucky Conference included AKC member programs Central City, Madisonville, Hopkinsville, Owensboro, and Henderson City/Barrett Manual, and sentiment among the other AKC members was that without the involvement of Central City, Owensboro, and Barrett Manual, whose basketball teams had all been regular participants in the previous AKC Tournaments, the prominence of AKC Tournament would be reduced too greatly and it would fall by the wayside.

In early 1947 the Western Kentucky Conference went ahead and proceeded with their inaugural tournament after agreeing to hold their tournament the weekend after the AKC Tournament, leaving WKC member teams available to play in both the AKC and WKC tournaments. The 8th Annual AKC Tournament was hosted at Louisville Male, as usual, on Jan 31 & Feb 1 while the WKC Tournament was hosted at Madisonville on Feb 7 & 8. Then some 10 months later in December of 1947, as arguments continued among basketball coaches and athletic directors within the AKC, a group of local coaches in Jefferson County decided to create a new tournament, the Louisville Invitational Tournament, which they intended to supersede the AKC Tournament. With the majority of the past AKC Tournament participant from Western Kentucky and Louisville opting to forego tournament participation that year, plans for the 1948 AKC Tournament were abandoned and the tournament came to an end, signaling what eventually became an end to the All-Kentucky Conference as a whole.

April 1911 Charter Members of the Western Kentucky High School Athletic Association:
- Henderson City/Barrett Manual High School
- Hopkinsville High School
- Madisonville High School
- Owensboro High School
- Paducah High School

October 1914 Charter Members of the Central Kentucky High School Athletic Association:
- Cynthiana High School
- Frankfort High School
- Georgetown High School
- Maysville High School
- Morton High School (later renamed Henry Clay)
- Mount Sterling High School
- Paris High School
- Winchester High School

April 1917 Charter Members of the Kentucky High School Athletic Association:
- Anderson County High School
- Ashland High School
- Carlisle High School
- Carrollton High School
- Clark County High School
- Covington High School (later renamed Holmes)
- Cynthiana High School
- Danville High School
- Frankfort High School
- LaGrange High School
- Lexington High School (previously named Morton, later renamed Henry Clay)
- Louisville Male High School
- Monticello High School
- Morganfield High School
- Owensboro High School
- Paris High School
- Somerset High School
- Stanford High School

April 1917 Charter Members of the Kentucky Interscholastic Association:
- Henderson City/Barrett Manual High School
- Hopkinsville High School
- Lexington High School (previously named Morton, later renamed Henry Clay)
- Louisville Male High School
- Kentucky Military Institute
- Owensboro High School
- Paducah High School
- Somerset High School

@Colonels_Wear_Blue

You are fantastic at researching history. If you don’t mind sharing, what resources do you use?

On 12/29/2025 at 3:27 PM, Colonels_Wear_Blue said:

Here is the current list of past-winners from the LIT.

1948 Owensboro
1949 Flaget
1950 Male
1951 Manual
1952 Manual
1953 Male
1954 Inez
1955 Male
1956 Berea
1957 Central
1958 Central
1959 Manual
1960 Central
1961 Elizabethtown Catholic
1962 St. Xavier
1963 Carr Creek
1964 Male
1965 St. Xavier
1966 Central
1967 Male
1968 Shawnee
1969 Central
1970 Clark County
1971 Male
1972 Central
1973 Male
1974 Bryan Station
1975 Male
1976 Male
1977 Ballard
1978 Apollo
1979 Lafayette
1980 Moore
1981 Bryan Station
1982 North Hardin
1983 Male
1984 Ballard
1985 Seneca
1986 Pleasure Ridge Park
1987 Pleasure Ridge Park
1988 Clay County
1989 Valley
1990 Fairdale
1991 Fairdale
1992 Pleasure Ridge Park
1993 Marion County
1994 Fairdale
1995 Male
1996 Male
1997 Owensboro
1998 Butler
1999 Pleasure Ridge Park
2000 Pleasure Ridge Park
2001 Ballard
2002 Male
2003 Eastern
2004 Seneca
2005 Trinity
2006 Eastern
2007 Ballard
2008 Manual
2009 Eastern
2010 Trinity
2011 Eastern
2012 Trinity
2013 Trinity
2014 Pleasure Ridge Park
2015 Ballard
2016 Ballard
2017 Fern Creek
2018 Trinity
2019 Trinity
2020 Ballard
2021 DeSales
2022 Male
2023 Ballard
2024 St. Xavier
2025 St. Xavier

The LIT was born as a response to decline of the All-Kentucky Conference Tournament, which was held from 1940-1947. The eight winning teams of the AKC Tournament were:

1940: Ashland
1941: St. Xavier
1942: St. Xavier
1943: Male
1944: Male
1945: Male
1946: Male
1947: Corbin

1940 All-Kentucky Conference Tournament

1941 All-Kentucky Conference Tournament

1942 All-Kentucky Conference Tournament

1943 All-Kentucky Conference Tournament

1944 All-Kentucky Conference Tournament

1945 All-Kentucky Conference Tournament

1946 All-Kentucky Conference Tournament

1947 All-Kentucky Conference Tournament

On 12/31/2025 at 8:15 AM, Voice of Reason said:

@Colonels_Wear_Blue

You are fantastic at researching history. If you don’t mind sharing, what resources do you use?

My biggest resource, by far, is the Newspapers.com archive. It was originally created by Gannett Media as a digitized and word-searchable archive of all their papers across the country (which includes the Louisville Courier-Journal, Cincinnati Enquirer, Park City Daily News, and Paducah Sun, among many others). Ancestry owns it now...I believe they own it outright...and they have started buying rights to expand and include digitized newspaper archives from many other papers, including the Lexington Herald-Leader, Kentucky Post, Ashland Daily Independent, Harlan Daily Enterprise, Corbin Times-Tribune, Middlesboro Daily News, Danville Advocate-Messenger, Frankfort State Journal, and Kentucky New Era....along with a ton of other little papers that most people nowadays probably don't even know existed. Their website says "Newspapers.com is the largest online newspaper archive consisting of 1 billion+ pages of historical newspapers from 29,900+ newspapers from around the United States and beyond," so needless to say, having that all available online...and having it word-searchable, to boot, is a MAJOR MAJOR resource for historical research.

Some of the archives - like the Kentucky Post - aren't complete. The Kentucky Post's archive, for example, is owned by the Kenton County Public Library. The Kenton Library has the full archive on microfilm at the Covington Branch, which I go down and check through occasionally since the digitized editions of the Post archive only goes up through 1972. I think the Ashland Daily Independent is another paper that may have a similar situation with some of its back-issues.

On 12/29/2025 at 8:27 PM, Ordell said:

Owensboro and Bryan Station are the only teams not from Jefferson County to have won the tourney multiple times. Anybody know how many times Owensboro played in the L.I.T?!?!

LIT results for Owensboro and Bryan Station.