Posted on 09/24/2019 10:00:54 AM PDT by FewsOrange
DES MOINES — An hour before kickoff at a game this month at Hoover High School, the opposing football team, Indianola High, pulled up and unloaded the large video monitor that would let its coaching staff analyze plays, moment by moment, throughout the game. The coaches at Hoover High, where most students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, would have to make do with watching the old-fashioned way. Another loss, a Hoover student told the principal, seemed imminent.
Indianola ran 84 yards for a touchdown on their first play, the running back shedding Hoover’s smaller players like a video-game villain. The game ended in a 35-7 loss for Hoover, to no one’s surprise.
During the past decade, Hoover High and Des Moines’s four other large public high schools have a cumulative record of 0-104 against rivals with more affluent student bodies from the Polk County suburbs, ...
With all that losing, leaders in places like Des Moines are contemplating a change in how high school athletic teams are matched up against one another: What if the poverty level of a school’s student body was used to decide which teams it played? ...
Over the past few years, officials overseeing high school sports in states including Minnesota, Oregon and Colorado have added provisions allowing schools with high poverty levels to drop down to lower athletic divisions. Washington State will introduce the idea next year, and Iowa is considering it.
Schools are commonly assigned to athletic divisions based on their enrollment, and Hoover, with more than 1,000 students, has long been placed in the state’s top athletic division, competing with the largest of Iowa’s public and private high schools. Its traditional rivals include city schools with relatively high poverty rates, but also suburban schools that have won the past nine state championships....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If you do well in division 3 you move up to division 2, if you go 0-whatever in division 1 you drop down. If the lowest division matches up a small enrollment school which puts a lot of effort into football against a much larger school that is not as good as other large schools, what does it matter as long as the teams are well matched.
Its got nothing to do with money
The same reason “poor” schools fail at football, is the same reason they fail at academics.
Be proactive! Put football out of it’s misery at the HS level. It’s a moronic sport played mainly by genetic freaks.
When I saw “Hoover High” I immediately thought of Hoover, Alabama which is a perennial power in Alabama.
Seems like the poorer schools would have more black players.
Does Iowa not know how to fairly rank their football games? Let the lower ranked schools player each other. The higher class teams play each other.
Problem solved.
I could see that there are advantages to being rich and none to being poor. It made me work hard, stay in school, study and learn, and get rich.
Truth and reality are excellent teachers.
Simple solution, just schedule the poor schools to play the Miami Dolphins.
I have an idea instead of whining about losing so much...play better. I hear this whining at the college level now also. You have the top 4...Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, Oklahoma and then you have everyone else. Those 4 programs sell their soul to get victories but it's not up to them to play worse or be made worse by the NCAA, its up to the Floridas, Oregons, LSUs and Michigans to play better.
I think it was Bear Bryant -way back in the days of segregation - that was ‘always’ crying about Bama being a powerhouse in the South but go to Michigan and Ohio etc and get our backsides handed to us by players that grew up in the shadows of ‘Bama but weren’t allowed to play in Alabama.
It changed....
That’s why Bear scheduled to play USC in 1970, he knew Bama would get their hides tanned and force to the school to allow black players.
That way, everyone can be losers.
Good idea. And bring this fairness percentage idea to the NFL.
Limit black players to just 13% of the team. Bring in more white players.
Affirmative Action must work both ways or it is just another instance of Racism.
Or the schools drop football and host co-ed soccer in the stadiums on Saturday afternoon. Liberals love that pansy game. I would no allow my kids to play that crap and they are better for it.
Bryant had already recruited and signed black players before that game. Wilbur Jackson was already playing on the freshman team that year.
Wilbur Jackson, the first black to sign a football scholarship at Alabama, was a freshman and ineligible to play in 1970.
Around here some of the poorer schools in rougher areas (McKeesport, Woodland Hills, Aliquippa, Clairton) generally have some of the best teams.
> Put football out of it’s misery at the HS level. <
I think that eventually will happen. Because the times they are a’changing. Players with suspected long-term concussion injuries will get lawyers. The lawyers will sue the school districts. And then the district’s liability insurance will become too expensive.
Eliminate the scoring system. Everybody wins.
I attended that game. Another factor was the Bear had preferred smaller and quicker linemen during his first decade or so at Alabama. Sam Cunningham was as big as many of Alabama's linemen and linebackers, which made bringing him down even more difficult. He changed his philosophy about the size of lineman during those same years.
One of the most black student schools, most poorest in Charlotte, kicked many teams butts for years. They were a fine football team. Outstanding band too.
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