Opponents refuse to play HS football powerhouse

Ummmm ...

 

I'm aware. Brutal game, too.

I thought I'd said on the CFB thread that BC would scare the shit out of Clemson but no, it was just to a friend.

Never been a Clemson fan. At all.

 

So you posted that "BC will scare the shit ..." bit in awareness of the outcome? I'm confused.

 

Was trying for the hockey thread.

 

Yup, in my area, which comprises the northern end of the vast Southern Section, a group of schools is petitioning the Central Section (Bakersfield, Fresno and thereabouts) to move to that section, mainly because they prefer the rules and bylaws there (like having higher seed host every playoff game, instead of the SS's process of coin flips and 'if you hosted this round, you can't host the next one.')

 

The following spring, the coach resigned and the ISL sanctioned Lawrence Academy.
Shortly thereafter, the coach had some problems of his own.

Former Green Beret to return to Boston after 14 months in Utah jail

 

Huh, didn't realize that. In full disclosure, the team that forfeited those years ago was in my coverage area. I wrote a story on the forfeit. Last year, it won the league title and it appears a repeat is a forgone conclusion.

 

There was a kid from my coverage area on that team. He was one of the better ones. I wrote about him once and talked to Taylor. He didn't seem like a bad guy to me, just kind of weird.
After the sanctions happened, I spent 90 minutes on the phone with one of the fired assistants. That was really weird.

 

Not just basketball, here in the Bay the private schools have all but made it impossible for a small public school to compete in the football playoffs. IIRC there seems to be more parity in the central section where teams like Tehachapi can make runs and your Bakersfield Christians won't just muscle through to a title. But I kind of wish there was a private school division for playoffs in the Central Coast. The West Catholic League can match up with private schools from Salinas, Watsonville, Milpitas etc and open up Div II and Div III to public schools to make their runs. It's hard to watch a 9-1/8-2 team who played a tough schedule get obliterated in the first round by a 4-6 private school who was 5th in the WCAL.

 

In Massachusetts the Catholics were dominating hockey for a while and the Mass athletic governing body created a Super 8 post season tournament. I don't know the exact figures, but Catholics are at least half of the teams, probably usually around 6., each year A public high school has won twice in 26 seasons.

 

Found this story on what different states do with private schools:

Compilation of how all 50 states handle competitive balance

 

We had a big kerfluffle in Mississippi last year with the Catholic schools. We have two associations here, a public school league and a private school league. The Catholic schools all predate the private league and in some cases had been in the public league since it was founded in the 1920s. They were almost all Class 1A and got a waiver to extend their "district" to a 20-mile radius of campus. Unfortunately, several of them are in Mississippi River towns and were drawing kids from Louisiana and Arkansas as well as Mississippi.

This was never a problem until the Catholic schools started winning in sports that mattered (like baseball and football) about 8-10 years ago. Then the small public schools took it seriously. The last straw came in 2014, when two Catholic schools played for the state football championship. Never mind that they'd been largely mediocre for the past 35 years, or that neither of them had ever won a football championship. Or that their talent cycle, just like any other school, eventually peaked and they had several years of success before they'd eventually drop back to the pack. All you heard from the small public schools was that they were recruiting everybody on the roster and
The public schools started pushing the state association (MHSAA) to adopt and enforce more stringent rules on residency. No students from outside Mississippi are supposed to be eligible to participate in any MHSAA activities, which includes non-competitive things like band and cheerleading, for example.
The next step was pushing for a multiplier rule that would have sent them from Class 1A to Class 3A, but it never came to that. The residency thing was the last straw for the Catholic schools. Three of them said "screw it" and shifted over to the private school association, which has far less stringent rules. You can fly a kid in from Alaska to play football if you want to, as long as he goes to school every day. By all accounts, they're much happier.