Honestly that’s a pretty embarrassing result of a season for Waukee NW. They have three P4 players on that team. In Iowa, that should be plenty to breeze to a title.
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High School Sports Thread
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Honestly that’s a pretty embarrassing result of a season for Waukee NW. They have three P4 players on that team. In Iowa, that should be plenty to breeze to a title.
Yes, brother. He is going to Texas A&M to play football.
It is not a surprise at all. Their coach can't win the games that matter. When Pryce Sandfort was a senior, they cared more about beating Waukee High in the semifinals than winning the championship, because they wanted to "own" Waukee High. They were loaded last year when they had SEP's best player transfer in, and lost to Valley in the championship game. They've had the talent to win state every year except 23-24 and have yet to do it.
Is NF close to Pokie? Didn’t think about the Garrigan center transferred from pokie that if she went the other direction she would have been a state champ.
Winning is going to get kids out, even at the smaller schools. Newell is a perfect example of that, when you are going to state in multiple sports in boys and girls, kids want to be part of winning. I do disagree that it's hard to lose that. All the programs can see their numbers drop within a few years if they get a long time coach leaving/retiring and the new coach struggles to win games at the same rate as they were before.
Look at a school like Twin Cedars, they had a very strong 8 man team for years, going to the playoffs multiple times with 45 to 50 kids out, now they are struggling to get half of that, when they are losing games. A lot of these rural schools and towns are dying, and it gets worse every 5 to 10 years. The sweet spot is to be a smaller school beside a large urban area like Gilbert or Van Meter, where you can just suck out the kids, and a lot of those parents have some money to send their children to camps and other things for them to get better.
Look at Gilbert population in 1990 was 796, 2000 up to 987, 2010 1,082 and 2020 up to 1,211. The town has grown by an average of 23% since 2020 and 2026 population is 1,492. That does not account for all the new homes being built in Ames north of Bloomington Road, which is in the Gilbert school district. They are opening up a new preK 2 grade building this fall, and already adding on to their new school that is less than 10 years old. Their population is growing leaps and bounds over the next decade or more.
And Algona is maybe 30 miles to Pocahontas. NF would've definitely been closer. Might've been a Catholic school thing. Pocahontas has a Catholic elementary and maybe MS, but no HS.
There can be a lot of reasons for kids to go to another school, though. Sometimes it's about other kids they know from AAU, maybe it's having other family in the area that can help out, etc.
This kid from St. Edmond took 468 shots during the regular season. That's a wild stat.
Agree with you on the Newell Fonda thing their long run is more than a group that came through and then went back to average. I assume there is some really good support at the lower grade levels for their sports.
This times 1000. Them losing with Omaha was coaching malpractice. We played them the yesr before to go to state and beat them, but they were good. All juniors. Add Omaha and it should have been a slam dunk. Old Drake coach Kanaskie’s son I believe.
