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The Ivies are completely full of BS in claiming that academics aren't the reason they don't participate in the post-season. They do in basketball, hockey, and lots of other sports. They're just being self-righteous. It's two HBCU conferences that don't participate - kind of. The SWAC and the...

Spot on. My kid's basketball team was on the losing side of a blowout last season. Opposing coach had to take one of their guys aside and tell him to stop chucking up threes or he was going to be benched for the rest of the day for being a poor sport.

Same here. The other tough thing is that when you have the 3rd or 4th stringers in (probably not so much in 9-man because there wouldn't be that many kids), you can't realistically tell them to not try. Those guys worked all year too. I coached a game a few years ago when we were up 35, which...

Mostly really small schools, but notably, Austin forfeited to Winona. Wow.

Mountain Iron -Buhl beat Bigfork 91-0? Is that for real? (FinnGopher beat me to it!)

Guys go there to play basketball. Same with Park Center. The ongoing debate is whether or not the MSHSL should be using the reduced lunch formula or should they be using ACTUAL attendance numbers for classification.

Here are the ACTUAL 64 largest schools in the state. Hopkins has an asterisk, as they were the last big metro school to use a Jr. High Model, so their numbers are 10-12 only. White Bear Lake has two campuses for high school, so those had to be combined. If we assume Hopkins actually has 1900...

It's not just small schools. Here are some numbers from large schools. First number is MSHSL enrollment (using the lunch formula). Second number is actual enrollment from the MDE. Park Center - 1377/1908 Hopkins - 1677/~1900 (I could only pull 2023 MDE data, and Hopkins was still 10-12 then, so...

Here's something interesting. The Big 9 is a pretty historic conference in southern Minnesota. Look how it's split up for district football. MSHSL Districts in which Big 9 teams are placed... Metro - South Mayo Northstar - South-Gold Mankato West, Mankato East Northstar -...

Man, I was just going to post something similar and decided against it.

Pine River is an awful team - they got killed every week. Staples-Motley is a good team - they're undefeated. This isn't a class issue. This is a mismatch no matter the attendance. And I'm not seeing where the whole "well, they're 2A, but have 3A enrollment" is coming from. I don't love the...

They don't really exist in the metro anymore either.

Right, but parents continue to pour multiple thousands of dollars into those youth sports.

Well, since conferences don't really exist for football any longer that wouldn't work.

There are schools that fall into a similar situation at all levels. We've often referenced Hopkins here because of their futility in football despite being a very large school. While their neighboring schools Edina, Minnetonka and Wayzata all have about 4-6 youth football teams per grade...

I think I missed something, and I looked back through the posts. What was not given serious consideration? Seeding all playoff teams instead of sections?

Yep. The example I often use is this. Right now there are twelve 7th grade boys teams in Wayzata. Six travel teams, and six Southwest League teams. The main difference here is that the 'travel' teams play whole weekend tourneys around the metro. The SW league teams play teams from other...

It's not just that (though the scholarship chasing is part of it). At the large suburban high schools, kids are specializing/playing year-round/travel/training etc. just to have the hope of making the high school team in some sports.

We know some people who coach in Wisconsin, and I think you described it pretty well from what I remember them telling me. I think it's a good system.

It's not summer vs. winter vs. fall. It's year-round sports (hockey, basketball, and to some extent baseball with training) vs. the shortest season sport with the fewest number of games (football). It's the sports parents have literally paid thousands and thousands of dollars on training...