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Opponents refuse to play HS football powerhouse

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by LongTimeListener, Oct 7, 2016.

  1. HanSenSE

    HanSenSE Well-Known Member

    To say nothing of the travel, and that part of the coast being a weekend destination for South Valley residents. Interested to see how it plays out. The Central took in the High Desert League a few years ago, but only if their teams hit the road for playoffs, even as a higher seed, for the first three years.
     
  2. LanceyHoward

    LanceyHoward Well-Known Member

    How strictly is the rule that someone goes to class everyday to ensure eligibiliu enforced?
     
  3. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    Depends on whether there's a rival school close by or not.
     
  4. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Most schools now have security checkpoints at the front door and people from rival schools can't just walk in off the streets to check attendance.

    If Football Factory Prep says that Billy Bluechip was in algebra class this morning, that's pretty much the end of it.
     
  5. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    You'd be amazed at the lengths people will go. Couple of years ago we had a kid transfer from School A, about 20 miles away, to School B. Something about his family situation was off-kilter, though, so he was still living near School A. Not illegal in the state's private school association, but it meant something in the paperwork was off and he was technically ineligible. School B had to forfeit four games because of it. By all accounts, the person who pointed out the error was someone from School A who was upset about the whole deal.

    We've also had situations in the public school ranks where a star player's parent mysteriously gets a job in a different town and moves in to play. Highly fishy, yes, but the lengths people go to prove it are comical. One basketball player, people were checking the amount of the electric bills at the house she was supposedly living in and using it as proof that no one was living there.
     
  6. cjericho

    cjericho Well-Known Member

    Star Ledger had an article last year, or maybe the year before, about the transfers in hs basketball. The top 6 or so catholic schools in NJ all had kids transfer in and out. It was like free agency in MLB.
     
  7. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    The funny part about the Mississippi situation was that the kids the Catholic schools were supposedly "recruiting," by and large, had been enrolled there at least since middle school. In many cases, since elementary school. These are good schools in bad districts, so people with the means to do so send their kids there as soon as they can, or they're families whose ties to the school run several generations deep.
    If they were recruiting them at that age thinking they were going to win state championships seven and 10 years down the road, they need to be working somewhere other than a small school in Mississippi.
     
  8. Smallpotatoes

    Smallpotatoes Well-Known Member

    I can only remember two, Reading about eight or nine years ago and Hingham five or six years ago.

    With a lot of the better hockey players bypassing high school hockey altogether for juniors, it's become a little more even lately.

    Massachusetts also has a Super Eight baseball tournament now.
     
  9. Oh, believe me. There's been all sorts of ways that state governing bodies have tried to regulate competition in the last several decades, but there are loopholes. I have seen, in the course of a quarter-century of field hockey and lacrosse reporting, the following:

    1. A family postponed a move from one school district to another until the first day of the kid's senior academic year to maintain eligibility for the school district with the strong spring sport.
    2. Multiple districts which, if there is room in the high school, have accepted tuition-paying students from another district in the amount of the tax money that the parent would have paid into the home district.
    3. Home-schooled kids who never run into their school peers except for the field of competition.
    4. A family who sent an elder child to one school as it won a state championship, then send the younger child to a school one mile away because they figured the second school had an athletic team which had a better chance to win a state championship.
    5. A high school which had a powerhouse athletic team even as a number of the players attended the county's designated science and technology school rather than the public school.

    New Jersey, especially, has occasionally some draconian rules on this. If they judge that a kid moved from one district to another for "athletic advantage," the kid cannot play with the new school's sports teams for 30 days EACH. S/he would have to sit out a month for THREE TEAMS.

    These rules also seem to empower school truancy investigators to try and locate parents, subpoena utility records, etc. I even remember one instance when a kid lived in a house which is bisected by a municipality line and the kid was arbitrarily sent to the one with the weaker sports teams.
     
  10. Findlay Prep? IMG Academy?
     
  11. The problem is the VHSL itself. Every sports team that exists in each of the Conferences/Districts must play each other school in its Conference/District in every sport. It is not possible to have a pro-rel system.
     
  12. cjericho

    cjericho Well-Known Member

    yes, I guess the rules are somewhat Draconian, but they are there because the private schools in some sports are so dominant. IMHO it's a tough call. have friends who coach at public and private schools. It is very polarizing. have a buddy, who is a usually reasonable guy, say that private schools shouldn't have sports. he thinks kids should just go to school there and play sports for the public school in their district.
     
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