I'm not sure about #2. Winter sports are in season. Maybe limit practices or something.
High School Sports Thread
- Thread starter qwerty
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I'm not sure about #2. Winter sports are in season. Maybe limit practices or something.
It honestly wouldnt do much. My experience of having a daughter who played at a successful smaller school for basketball. AAU is a killer, the other one is parents living through their kids.
The biggest issue with smaller schools (and even some 3As) is a lot of people live in those towns because they are cheap, they can be left alone, there are less rules (such as crap all over your yard) and such. Many times these are also parents that don’t take as active of a position with their kids and/or don’t have the funds to foot the bill for decent equipment or even just rounding up a team to play a little youth ball so they learn to do basic things.
Kids conference has a 5 day dead stretch during Christmas break (they always use Christmas and Christmas Eve as two so it’s kind of a joke) and the state has one week around the last week of July.
Girls hoops has had an incredible stratification in a few years. The good teams got better and the bad teams got worse. Just in the course of my daughters time in HS playing a lot of the same teams, it went from playing a lot of competitive games with a few lopsided losses and wins to basically every game being lopsided. Literally losing by 40 and winning by 50+ in the same week.
If anyone is wondering if Johnston is going to take a step back when Lewis goes to ND they have an 8th grade PG that is a stud.
Played in a men’s league in Huxley in the spring, 10 minute continuous clock quarters. We lost a game 134-33 and was both demoralizing and comical at the same time.
91-6 just seems absurd. I mean once it’s 50-3 don’t you just hold the ball?
DSM East won a State Championship in 2011 going 26-0. How the times have changed for the Des Moines public schools.
Pretty crazy how far they’ve fallen. Also crazy how quickly Roosevelt and North have fallen. These were pretty good teams 3-4 years ago. Now they aren’t East but they are quite bad.
Open enrollment is a killer. Not Iowa but look at Millard Souths dominance this year https://www.maxpreps.com/ne/omaha/millard-south-patriots/football/schedule/
Loaded with D1 athletes, several who open enrolled.
This. I thought we would be entering some golden age of girls hs basketball after her run that revolutionized the women's game. Found out my hometown (3A) didn't even have enough interest to field a varsity team last season. Girls wrestling seems to be the sport that's really taking off.
It’s the trend for a lot of sports. More high level and college players than ever but way fewer regular average to good HS players participating. I suppose specializing is some of it, open enrollment concentrating talent, then people not wanting to go out and get their asses kicked. Plus girls wrestling and travel volleyball is cutting into numbers. But boys sports are seeing some of these trends too, so it’s a broad thing.
My daughter was a really good player on a pretty average/bad team and graduated in 2023. Even in her time I saw that AAU was killing the sport. The difference in the teams that had AAU players (that played basketball year round) and the teams that just had athletes...girls that wanted to play basketball in the winter...those teams with the AAU players just murdered everyone.
Now the state is reaping what it sowed...the average girl athlete that just wanted to play basketball in winter doesn't want to compete, and get killed, by the girls that play 12 months out of the year...and here we are, with terrible numbers and schools canceling girls basketball.
How is the state or associations responsible for kids playing AAU? What are they supposed to do about it? The states’s levers for competitive balance include limiting open enrollment eligibility and applying factors to BEDS count based on success or socioeconomic factors.
Pretty sure East girls lost 87-0 or something like that within the last 5 years.
Edit: looks like it was 84-0 against Urbandale in 2022
The very simple solution in football is relegation...but that will never happen and in basketball with conferences relegation won't work. So there is no solution, but that the sport continues its down hill slide until nobody gives a **** anymore but a handful of schools and parents.
It's high school. Since the beginning of high school there have been teams that are really good and teams that are really really not good. Blowouts have always happened. Coaches can tell their team not to shoot until 1 sec on the shot clock in those situations. They can also put in their scrubs and tell them not to play aggressive defense. We don't need to keep changing rules to prevent blowouts. There will always be blowouts.
If you think what is happening in girls basketball (and football for that matter) is just normal good teams vs bad teams like always....your either not paying attention, don't have kids in sports or have a kid in one of the schools that kicks everyone's ass and so you don't care. Girls basketball is in real trouble in this state and probably nationally. And HS football in Iowa is not far behind.
Probably wouldn't work at all but throwing something against the wall. Maybe if you have a kid that is playing AAU all year outside of high school they can't open enroll. So if they are really good in basketball and go to North and do AAU all year, you play at North. You don't get to transfer to Johnston where all your AAU mates are.
They may get mad and not play at all in high school, but it would keep all those in 12 month AAU kids from piling in at one high school for a super team and maybe make teams kind of competitive again.
Like I said, just throwing crap against the wall.
Here’s the thing - there are a lot of schools where kids DO play AAU ball the whole time growing up and then in 9th grade they still quit because they know they won’t play.
Some of those guys transfer to other schools as well.
I see this all the time. I call it “no middle”. You end up with anybody remotely interested in a sport joining club teams, and then local/rec leagues really struggle because nobody is left who is good.
This also takes experienced parent coaches out of the pool, so the kids that already aren’t getting good coaching now have bad coaches. I’ve done what I can, I coach a lot of rec sports and I do a good job for that level but it’s really hard.
