I will agree the numbers do not even come close to placing Riverside in the upper half then or now! They are how ever part of the middle 50% (12-36) of AAAA populalation now. Anyone who really gets into this can put the numbers into excell and come up with about a dozen statistical breakdowns, but the plain and simple fact is that there are a lot of schools playing against schools much larger/smaller than themselves and the fairness of that is questionable.
The Nation Ford thing is simply a matter of the district wanting to kepp both of its high schools in the same division. The funny thing is that the 2007 number had no seniors at NFHS (becasue it was 1st year of school and no seniors were there as they were allowed to graduate from FMHS), and FMHS numbers included juniors who would not be there as seniors! So in effect Fort Mill school district placed both of its high schools in AAAA when they were both actually only AAA schools. I am sure someone would say well they wanted to save travel money or well the growth should have gotten them back to AAAA level but the economic down turn slowed that. Well they only made it to 59th with FMHS and I doubt 48th was even achievable so this was a case of the board blowing it and making it unfair to its players.
In the Riverside case they did just the opposite to them, from 47th to 34th well it seems really clear someone was sandbagging, but hey the board was using the system to give its players an advantage, some might say a rather unfair one, but within the rules. The question is really one of why they really requested to stay down in the smaller divison if the AD says to save travel well then I guess there are not enough AAAA schools in their area.
Right we all believe that one!
(and do not think I am bashing the Riverside players they earned the wins, after all NHWS beat Irmo a much larger school who beat Wando an even larger school. The difference was they were playing in the division they belonged in and won it all)
