High School Sports
TentakilRex
- Land O Insects between Quincy-Macomb-Jacksonville
Football practice starts on Wednesday
TentakilRex
- Land O Insects between Quincy-Macomb-Jacksonville
Curbelo Fanboy
BERTBALL IS LIFE
Season will be 3 weeks deep by Labor Day weekend due to the IHSA adding a week to the playoffs so 3-6 or 2-7 teams can qualify. In the pantheon of IHSA dumb decisions this is in the team photo along with 4 class basketball. Old guy will now step down from his soap box.
Just because there's that many kids in the school doesn't mean they can get enough to go out for football. Tough to get players to come out when you've had 0 or 1 win in every season since they last made the playoffs a decade ago.
Football isn't just a sport where you sign up your freshman year and give it a shot. Guys at the freshmen level have, for the most part, played multiple years prior. Nor is it a sport where you get to your freshman year and just stop playing because the varsity is historically bad.
You have the chicken/egg argument going on when you say it's hard to get kids to come out when you're winning 1 game or less every year. If the youth programs were run properly, you'd have a better caliber of players, in larger numbers and you'd be winning more games.
The problem starts at the pee wee level and it filters right up through the feeder programs. That's where the failure (for the lack of a better term) is at. Something isn't working at the ground level. It's either a decreasing interest in football for another sport perhaps (?) or a lack on community support for the programs. With a 1,000 kid enrollment, you should have enough kids to field a team at all levels.
Much, much bigger problem there than the varsity team. That's just the obvious and unfortunate result.
TentakilRex
- Land O Insects between Quincy-Macomb-Jacksonville
Yeah Eisenhower is a program where the new playoff system was supposed to save.
There is another alternative. The feeder programs were being run well, and the numbers were there. Kids go through the entire feeder program, see that the high school teams aren't doing so well, and transfer.
That is a real thing that happens. I know of one school where kids played in their feeder programs all the way until high school and transferred to other schools in the conference for freshman year. One season, of the 22 players on their conference's all-conference team, 17 who were originally from that school had transferred to other schools in the conference, and only 2 were left at the original school.
I'm sure some of those kids transferred for legitimate reasons (parents got new jobs and moved or just moved in general), while some were recruited to go to other schools, and some just saw greener pastures and left. You can't build a winning program or even a successful program in that scenario.
Success helps your numbers grow. Yeah the youth programs help quite a bit but if your program has not shown that it can win consistently over a year-to-year basis, it's gonna be tough to convince any of the kids at the school to go out for the team.
TentakilRex
- Land O Insects between Quincy-Macomb-Jacksonville
Curbelo Fanboy
BERTBALL IS LIFE
Living in Chatham I have seen Eisenhower play a few times in sort of recent years. Similar to Southeast & Lanphier in Springfield. Very thin on the numbers side for quite a while & don't appear to be very well coached in the fundamentals. Can't execute kicks, kick return, stuff like that.
But in the defense of those schools, the good talent that would go to those schools based on boundaries are typically cherry picked by the private schools in the area. SHG in Springfield has first crack at most all the good talent in the city. Decatur to a lesser degree with St Theresa.
It is jarring to see a school of that size not able to field a team but I have been at games where those schools have had 40 or fewer guys on the roster for a varsity game. It's not too hard to get from 40 to 30 or less & at that point fielding a team becomes borderline untenable.
Curbelo Fanboy
BERTBALL IS LIFE
The IHSA needs to just bite the bullet & make privates their own classification in the playoffs. I would also throw non boundaried schools into this as well. If you see what East St Louis is doing in recent years, I'd virtually guarantee they have kids playing football for them that aren't waking up in East St Louis school district each morning. They frankly should play at a 7A/8A level.
I mean they just got the kicker from Belleville Althoff to transfer for this year. On it's face it is absurd to think a kid is moving to East St Louis who last year could afford to go to Althoff just to play football. That kid isn't living in East St Louis if I had to bet on it. No coincidence that their failings in the kicking game is the only reason ESL didn't win the title game last fall. Multiple botched punts leading to scores in a game they lost by 10.
Exactly. I did see Glenwood is traveling to Moline in place of that Eisenhower game.
I was also talking with a friend of mine from the gym last night who has kids playing football for Rochester and the Eisenhower news puts them in a real tough spot scheduling wise because that was supposed to be their senior night game. Which would seem really early for it when that game was supposed to be, in early September. Rochester's schedule this year is a bit road heavy in the middle portion of the season. While they do have two home games late in the year, the first of those is their homecoming game. The second is SHG and there's no chance they would do their senior night stuff the same night as that game.
Curbelo Fanboy
BERTBALL IS LIFE
At a few games where Glenwood is playing Southeast/Lanphier/Eisenhower (the real bad teams) I have used a reference to the Goldie Hawn movie Wildcats. "That team looks like Wildcats before Goldie showed up". A near unspeakable level of badness.