Very weak district.Might. They'll face a 4 seed. But they needed overtime to beat North Mahaska, who won't even make the playoffs out of their district.
At a lot of schools it’s hard to get on the court/field in HS if you don’t specialize and play club, let alone play in college.
The bigger the school, the more competitive those spots are too. We did club baseball from 10U through 14U with a couple seasons of fall ball and a couple seasons of spring ball in high school with my oldest. If you didn't do that you weren't seeing the field. Football, at least for the skill positions you'd better be doing 7v7 in the offseason if you want to play. We also did club swim for a couple years. My sons schedule from the middle of his sophomore year through the end of HS swim season looked like go to in season practice (baseball or football) come home and grab a sandwich then go to a 2-3 hour swim practice then come home, maybe do a little homework and go to bed. Summer time was baseball, club swim and summer football workouts along with a lifeguard job. Then during HS swim season he had off season baseball too. Now that I have the benefit of hindsight I wouldn't trade the fun we had with club for anything but if you want to play more than one sport in HS it's a hell of a grind for those kids. We never forced him to do any of that but he knew how much work it was going to take to see the field, even at a school that isn't exactly a sports powerhouse. I don't think that if we were at a big school that was good at sports he would have sniffed the field in anything but swim and we probably would have pulled the plug on everything else by the time he was a sophomore.
East played Linn-Mar in the boys state championship in 2004. Now remember I was just a young whipper snapper (8th grade) but I remember it being billed as streetball vs a disciplined team. LM won in a close game but that became the beginning of their long run and I honestly don't remember if East has done anything since.
That was the end for East. That was the Mike Henderson, Carlton Reed, Frashon McGhee group.
WE at least has a functional boys BB program. Baseball has been not very good, but not completely terrible.
Waterloo East baseball has been ok the last few years. They've hovered right around a .400 winning percentage which is a whole hell of a lot better than West as been in that same time frame. Now granted the level of competition in the MVC is quite a bit stiffer than the Iowa Alliance but East probably has double the amount of wins in baseball in that same time period. From what I've seen, outside of football East has been respectable at most sports since they switched conferences. The next couple years are going to be interesting because there are school board members here lobbying in the background to start combining some of those teams that are borderline in terms of participation before the new school opens. There's already 3 or 4 sports for both boys and girls combined so you might see that Band-Aid get ripped off sooner rather than later. IMHO if there's a coaching vacancy between now and then they should just combine them and get it over with. There's no way they'd get a decent coach for any sport knowing they'll have to re-apply for the job in 2-3 years anyway.
WE baseball reminded me of the DM metros girls BB teams right before they fell off the cliff. Varsity level was respectable but the lower levels really struggled.
With the district cycle, they're going to have to combine football for '27 instead of waiting until '28. I've heard from several people that Lonnie thinks he's getting the job which would be a terrible mistake but it would be the most Waterloo thing ever.
Nope. He's been in the Waterloo district since I was in high school 25 years ago.
