Iowa HS's not playing FB this year

BryceC said:
Zero, public schools also recruit
Click to expand...
This itself isn’t related, but if you think public school recruiting is anywhere in the same solar system as parochials, you are certifiably insane. The amount of private school poaching going on in this state is staggering. And no I’m not just a casual observer to it.
 
Siouxland Christian has been cancelling just about everything but basketball for a long time. They’re a tiny little startup school in Sioux City that basically started in a strip mall next to the Gordon Drive Menards. A bunch of really really wealthy parents decided they wanted their own Christian school in town and this is the result. They tried baseball for a couple seasons and it ended up being a disaster. Nothing surprising about cancelling football. That school has some parents/administrators who want to be a private school basketball powerhouse. They hired MOC/FV’s coach away from that school to be a coach/AD.

Somebody convince me there wasn’t a TON of money to drag a legacy 3A coach away from a job that he had ridiculous success at. I’d love to hear the comedy.

Parochials are all money, folks. They need to be given the option to either play up a class (or 2 at the 1A level) or play in a private school conference. Problem solved easily. 4A/5A parochials play amongst themselves. Let Dowling and Assumption duke it out in football and if they want they can do a saints vs sinners game at the end of the year if they want to see who’d win between the public state champs and the private conference champs.
 
Fryowa said:
This itself isn’t related, but if you think public school recruiting is anywhere in the same solar system as parochials, you are certifiably insane. The amount of private school poaching going on in this state is staggering. And no I’m not just a casual observer to it.
Click to expand...
A big part of the difference is that if someone is going from public to public, they have to clear open enrollment. My brother told me that the school where he teaches/coaches "almost got John Doe" but the school wouldn't release him, but they can't keep him from leaving 2 years in a row. The Des Moines area public is as bad or worse that private recruiting in most areas of the state. I do know that a neighboring school lost their ace because the local Catholic school offered his dad a job as their pitching coach so his son could come there to play. Son graduated and his position was eliminated.

I don't know how much it happens, but I know of a very successful coach that went from a NW Iowa school to a central Iowa school because these 4 dads were able to "make it worth his while" to finish out his career coaching there. He got them a state championship, so it was worth it.

Dammit Fry, now you got me all worked up. My Calculus class is coming in and is going to wonder why I'm so fired up today.
 
Fryowa said:
Siouxland Christian has been cancelling just about everything but basketball for a long time. They’re a tiny little startup school in Sioux City that basically started in a strip mall next to the Gordon Drive Menards. A bunch of really really wealthy parents decided they wanted their own Christian school in town and this is the result. They tried baseball for a couple seasons and it ended up being a disaster. Nothing surprising about cancelling football. That school has some parents/administrators who want to be a private school basketball powerhouse. They hired MOC/FV’s coach away from that school to be a coach/AD.

Somebody convince me there wasn’t a TON of money to drag a legacy 3A coach away from a job that he had ridiculous success at. I’d love to hear the comedy.

Parochials are all money, folks. They need to be given the option to either play up a class (or 2 at the 1A level) or play in a private school conference. Problem solved easily. 4A/5A parochials play amongst themselves. Let Dowling and Assumption duke it out in football and if they want they can do a saints vs sinners game at the end of the year if they want to see who’d win between the public state champs and the private conference champs.
Click to expand...
www.wglt.org

Private vs. public debate persists at IHSA state football championships

Debates over perceived advantages private schools have over public schools in Illinois High School Association [IHSA] athletics continued as the state football championships played out in Normal and DeKalb.
www.wglt.org www.wglt.org

Decent article regarding this issue in Illinois at the prep level.
Sorta long but interesting.
 
As far as public poaching goes...just some tidbits...

My hometown is Hampton.
We poached the next school system to our west (CAL) for years until CAL joined Hampton-Dumont.

Clear Lake is a member of our North Central Conference. They raid the hell out of Mason City. Have for years and years. They dominate in most sports nowadays in the conference,
And look who's rated #2 pre-season FB in 3A.

Solon is famous for securing Iowa City kids.
And they are very very good in just about everything year after year.
And btw, they are rated #1 pre-season FB in 3A.

You think Waukee NW, the new DSM-area powerhouse, isn't stealing kids?
Their girls track team set something like 4-5 *all-time* Iowa girls best times this past Spring.

Interesting times we live in.
 
It's everywhere. Up until two years ago I was coaching at a Metro team in St. Paul. Total enrollment was just under 1700 for high school and the middle school that funneled in typically had more than a 1000. For high school and JV combined we could barely field 50 kids. This is a school that made the state playoffs in 4A less than 10 years prior.

Myself and a few other parents helped to build the youth program up where we had several hundred kids from Flag to 7th-8th grade. As of now there is no youth program and I was involved in both the youth program and Varsity coaching for 15 years.. The district redrew the boundary lines with another school in our district which cut out a lot of the Black and White kids and we get mostly Asian or East African kids who have never grown up with football and in most cases are not physically imposing. If we could get more Hmong kids out it would help but family is so close knit in many cases they are required to work at the family business and all weekend have activities with the family so commitment isn't there.

The thing I have also seen first hand is many kids are soft and don't want to work. It was common for us to come out of fall camp with 60-70 guys and finish with around 30 in October. A few years ago we also had 4 student athletes that were fathers, one of them with two kids with his first being born when he was in 8th grade. Poaching and transfers were a major issue we had to deal with. We had a very successful youth team 5 years ago that travelled to Texas for a tournament and won a few games and were competitive. Of that team I think maybe a third ended up playing for us. Some decided not to play football but the majority transferred to what they thought were better programs. Same thing happened to our Softball team. Won a couple state titles and I think we had a 15 year streak on winning conference. Now they don't even have a team. No youth program and no leadership. Not even going to mention Hockey except we had our home arena rented out to another school since we no longer could field our own squad.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


Latest posts

Share this page



Top