As a parent of one of the St. Joe's players I recognize that I’m risking life & limb by throwing in my two cents here, but so be it…
Playing in the 1A Division – I can guarantee you that nobody at St. Joe’s enjoys playing 1A soccer; not the players, not the coaches and certainly not the parents. It’s unfair to the other teams, and it’s unfair to our boys. Unfortunately it’s not up to the school – the rules are driven by enrollment, and by those rules St. Joseph is a 1A school. Trust me when I tell you that the boys would much rather beat up on 4A schools ;-). Of course, if they had played 4A this year and won (which they would have) the complaint would still have been that it’s unfair; they’re rich and play club soccer and that the school recruits the best players, which leads me to...
Recruitment – St. Joseph DOES NOT recruit players, and although they do offer scholarships and/or financial aid to families, it is offered to everyone based on need. There is no special category of aid for athletes. If you were to think about it for a minute you would realize that they don’t need to recruit. As mentioned in previous comments, St. Joe’s tuition is quite high (don’t I know it!) and it requires a certain amount of financial stability to send your kids there. High end club soccer (premier/academy level) is also very expensive so parents that can afford to have their boys play club soccer can (mostly) afford to send their kids to a private school. What really drives recruitment at St. Joe’s is a combination of their previous success (good soccer players tend to want to play for quality, winning programs) and their proximity to CESA. These boys already know each other from club soccer and the decision to go to school together is an easy one. Finally…
What to Do – Bluntly speaking, there’s probably nothing that can be done. It would be great to be able to implement Paul Schleifer’s proposal, but there’s a bunch of 3A and 4A schools that would block it at every turn. An alternate solution would be to allow schools to petition to move individual sports to the appropriate level, but it would have to be sport specific – a school like St. Joseph, which can complete at the highest levels in sports like soccer and baseball, could not complete in resource intensive programs such as football at the 4A level. What St. Joseph does now to manage the situation is to schedule as many games as possible against class 3A/4A schools. It’s not clear what can be done about the scores during conference play; during the Blackville final Kucinic pulled all of his starting juniors and seniors, and the remaining players still scored five goals.
Update: I like pjay's proposal -- it would allow a school like St. Joe's to move up without impacting existing 3A/4A schools.
Last edited by Emilio; 05/23/13 07:18 PM.
