12-year phenom .. or not

In my long and crazy experiences with kids' sports (in any sport in which any body contact whatsoever is allowed and the opposition takes an active role in playing 'defense') it has pretty much been consistent that any time teams mandatorily include players of more than two years' age-span, you are getting into massive physical-mismatch territory.

I'm not really sure how OK I would be with having fourth-and-fifth graders running XC against high schoolers. One good hip bump coming around a tree sends Kiddie face first into the dirt.

 

A few years ago, my daughter ran an invitational at Hereford High School in Maryland. Part of the course included a totally out-of-control downhill sprint that could only be stopped by hitting a tree at the bottom. It was unbelievable. And it would have left a fourth-grader as a grease spot at the bottom of the tree.

 

Oh, be fair. Sometimes they have rosters, too.

 

Just out of idle curiosity I surfed over to MaxPreps to take in some of their offerings.

I checked out their national prep rankings and my eyes bugged out.

Ranked up in the top 10 or so was a private school which used to play against schools in the coverage area of a paper I worked at a decade or so ago.

This team always sucked. Always always always. They had several goose-egg seasons. They played about a half-dozen games against our area teams, Class D, bad ones, the rinky dinks of the rinky dinks. Kids with horn rim glasses and black socks. They always lost -- bad. Snoopy vs. the Red Baron territory bad ("10, 20, 30, 40, 50 or more...")

OK, I understand a lot can change in a decade or more, especially at a private school which can suddenly decide it wants to recruit, but I simply could not believe this death ship school had suddenly morphed into a nationally-ranked program.

They don't play any of those old rinky-dink Class D public schools anymore, but they did beat by 10 points a charter school which does play a few of the rinky dink publics. And this charter school, sure enough, gets freaking hammered by most of them. They roll up the court on their charter school opponents, but when they go up against Hooterville County, 7-13 from the Class C Hinterlands League, they lose 66-52.

I know of course transitive scores can be funny, but if Team A beats Team B by 10 points and then Team B loses by 14 to a 7-13 team from the Bugtussle Valley Happy High School League, there is no god damn mother fucking way in hell Team A is one of the 10 best teams in the country.

A top 10 team in the country, matched up against a team even remotely equivalent (much less losing by double digits) to a sub-.500 team from a rural hooterville county league, should blow that team off the court literally by as many points as the scoreboard can handle.

And it wasn't just one bad game either; the supposed powerhouse, although having only lost twice, also had several other single-digit wins over charter schools whose schedule seemed to indicate they were playing teams that wandered in from the rainstorms or from playing in traffic.

Which would seem to indicate very possibly that someone -- the coach maybe, I dunno --- appears to be engineering scores for a possible variety of reasons (sandbagging opponent scouts, dispelling undue media attention, etc etc). Which raises a whole new fundamental question about a lot of these teams.

Back to the main point: MaxPreps' national rankings, like all national rankings, are Bull. Shit.