At this point I highly doubt it. Dowling just has way too many resources they can utilize and they have a tight process in place. Plus, as the DSM city schools continue to struggle guess who gains from that?
Level the playing field in HS athletics
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At this point I highly doubt it. Dowling just has way too many resources they can utilize and they have a tight process in place. Plus, as the DSM city schools continue to struggle guess who gains from that?
most teams don't anyway so cutting the number doesn't solve what you see as the problem
Agree. Softball is in the spring here in Illinois, and Mother Nature ends up winning about half of my daughter's April and May games.
Plus, it's great playing a sport when school isn't in session. Having grown up in Iowa, I have fond memories of summer bus trips with my teammates to Muscatine, Clinton, Burlington, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, etc, for road games.
There’s a lot of kids that think they are awesome at baseball and their parents think they are awesome. This is a way to peg the insane ones back a little bit. It’s really prevalent in baseball for some reason and it comes to light with the recent episodes. You don’t want your kid to grow being WDM slow pitch softball guy.
My senior year, at 4A Des Moines Hoover, we only had 20 guys between Juniors and Seniors for football. We had to bring up Sophomores to be able to practice. We won 0 games my Junior year and 2 my Senior year.
It is not a case of not enough kids, at least there. It is a case of not enough kids that give a ****. The same core of kids participated in pretty much all of the extra curricular activities at the school. Most of those kids were the ones who actually lived in the Beaverdale area near the school. A majority of the kids who were bused in from the MLK area didn't give a crap about school or sports. The got on the bus and went home after school.
The only sport Hoover has consistently had success in is basketball, because you only need 5 good players.
I think classes should be based on performance more than school size. The Hoover's and North's of the world would benefit greatly from being able to play 3A, at least in football. It would make sense that the best and worst teams should move back and forth between divisions. If a 3A private school is beating the crap out of their competition every year, have them take a shot at the big boys for the next 3 or 4 years. Make the highest class the huge schools and bigger private schools and expand 3A to include the lesser performing 4A schools as well.
Fair enough...I'm sure many ADs would not agree with me because we all know Football is king
I think Waukee was building to be the one to unseat them but won’t get it done in time before the split.
We almost never won at Hoover, but I was able to wrestle, play football, and be in band. So I had that going for me, which is nice.
I obviously don't follow them close enough, just remember back when I was in school seemed like they were always the roadblock everyone in the conference ran into trying to make state and the level of talent they had compared to everyone else was significantly. I still don't like how a private school in the DM metro who obviously is able to pull from a wider talent base due to the population and open enrollment for being a private school is in the same conference as schools like West Central Valley, Pleasantville, Guthrie Center/Adair Casey, Panorama, Earlham, Madrid, Odgen, etc. Lot of schools there made up of multiple small rural communities who don't have the advantage DM Christian does of getting enrollment from the much larger DM Metro area. They do have Van Meter in their conference who has been good the past few years but that is not always the norm for them as they too are a small rural school.
I still stand by my opinion that private schools need to be playing in a conference more in line with the level of talent their athletics usually are in line with and not their enrollment which are more in the 3A/4A kind of schools not 1A/2A. I'm not one of these people that are the participation ribbon mentality but it's clearly obvious that many private schools athletics are typically not of the same caliber of talent compared to public schools of the same size enrollment.
Dowling isn't competing for championships in wrestling. They used to, but not anymore. They had a couple good seasons in baseball, but aren't one of the usual contenders, especially from the metro.
So if you use the multiplier and make private schools play up a class, is Dowling playing in a class by themselves? Or maybe one with just them, Heelen, Assumption, Xavier and Whalert? What's your solution, because a private school only class would be less fair than the current set up for the rest of the private schools.
They started the tournament in 1972 and Dowling didn't win until 2000. But to your point; Dowling will probably remain dominant simply because they can draw on such a large talent pool. In that they're probably unique. I'm not sure any other Catholic schools in Iowa can keep their enrollments up such that their talent pool can be superior to neighboring public schools. Maybe Xavier?
This and their facilities are coaching are 2nd to none. I know an assistant coach on the staff, they have more coaches than a college program.
I can tell you at least from my experience growing up (Garrigan grad) we generally were better with sports than Algona. I can point to a few obvious reasons:
#1 We started playing rec ball as kids but split off at 4th grade or so and had school sponsored teams as well as the traveling tournament teams. It was the same 10 kids or whatever we had from probably 4th grade until we were seniors in most sports.
#2 Having a YMCA in town allowed for year-round training for those fortunate enough to have a membership.
#3 Our coaches in a lot of sports were awesome. Coach Wadle has been the football coach for 20 years or so. The Meister family has been in charge of baseball/softball for roughly forever. That makes a huge difference.
Note: We didn't have a single "recruited" kid. Our best "recruits" came out of St. John's in Bancroft.
#1 We started playing rec ball as kids but split off at 4th grade or so and had school sponsored teams as well as the traveling tournament teams. It was the same 10 kids or whatever we had from probably 4th grade until we were seniors in most sports.
#2 Having a YMCA in town allowed for year-round training for those fortunate enough to have a membership.
#3 Our coaches in a lot of sports were awesome. Coach Wadle has been the football coach for 20 years or so. The Meister family has been in charge of baseball/softball for roughly forever. That makes a huge difference.
Note: We didn't have a single "recruited" kid. Our best "recruits" came out of St. John's in Bancroft.
Lets look at Dowling's sports history, 9 championships in football, 7 in Boys CC, 5 in girls CC, 2 in boys BB, 5 in baseball, 6 in wrestling, 4 in swimming, 2 in tennis, at least one in girls BB.
My question still stands, last Dowling team in any sport that was .500 or below? They are playing at the highest level, nothing can be done about that, but how many of the other private schools are not? The answer would be most, and that should change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_Catholic_High_School
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I'm sure this is true; my point is that Dowling probably doesn't have the enrollment woes of most other Catholic schools in the state. Their enrollment can stay large enough, and their tuition can stay high enough that they're able to fund athletic facilities and staffs so that they are "second to none". If you're a Catholic school in a large enough metro you can become impervious to the budgetary problems facing Catholic schools in smaller metros.
It would be interested to see those numbers compared to Valley, Waukee, Johnston, and combine the Ankeny schools together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_Catholic_High_School
Throw Valley out of the mix and the rest of the DM schools have really won very little. East won a state title in girls BB, SEP in wrestling, Ankeny before they spilt one a title in football, the girls have won multiple titles in BB and softball. But I do not think anything after the split, at least in the boys sports. Waukee won one in girls sb in 4a, the other two was when they were in 2A in 20 years ago. Hoover or North won a boys BB title one year. But the picking have been few and far between for the rest of the metro schools.
Throw Valley out of the mix and the rest of the DM schools have really won very little. East won a state title in girls BB, SEP in wrestling, Ankeny before they spilt one a title in football, the girls have won multiple titles in BB and softball. But I do not think anything after the split, at least in the boys sports. Waukee won one in girls sb in 4a, the other two was when they were in 2A in 20 years ago. Hoover or North won a boys BB title one year. But the picking have been few and far between for the rest of the metro schools.
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I got you:
So Dowling has won 40 state championships in total?
By my count Valley has won 73. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_High_School_(West_Des_Moines,_Iowa)
IC West has 61: https://www.iowacityschools.org/sit...einstanceid=28282&dataid=38664&FileName=State Championships.docx 2.pdf
Waukee has: 15 (I think) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waukee_High_School#Athletics
Johnston: 4 in baseball (all I could find) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_High_School
Ankeny: Over 60 (the board in the picture has 8 squares of 8 rows, all filled last time I drove by) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankeny_Community_School_District#Athletics
SEP: 11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Polk_Community_School_District#High_school_activities
Urbandale: 24 https://www.j-hawks.com/hof/Team_Champs/index
Bettendorf: 55 http://bhs.bettendorf.k12.ia.us/extracurricular/athletics
So again, we come back to Dowling may currently be the dominant team in football, but overall, not so much.
