foxbat

I just realized that. Must of hit the scroll wheel in the load.

Lawrenceburg was the first 1A state champ in modern history back in 1975.

I think you'd have to add Pioneer to that mix. LCC and Pioneer have often been the ones to eliminate each other in sectional or regional play, so despite the strength of program, they sometimes never made it out of sections due to the eventual state champ. Since 2009, the last 13 seasons, LCC and Pioneer have met in post season eight times and eliminated each other ... and in four seasons they were in different classes, so they couldn't meet. In four of those eight seasons, they entered post season as #1/#2 and in another two they were both in the Top 3/4. Pioneer's early exits from post season weren't due to a mishap or weak schedule that caught up with them ... in some cases, they played the state championship game in the first or second game of the post season. Pioneer definitely fits in the pound-for-pound group!

Is that CJB's bike in the backgorund?

Reminds me of Alfred Doolittle's response to Colonel Pickering.

Of interest to me is that athletics is getting the spotlight here. It is estimated that some 50-75% of college students change majors at least once in college. The number of students who transfer institution as a whole as opposed to within is also not a small number. As you point out @Bobref, we see this movement in real-life and, more specifically, in college environments in non-athletic aspects already. We don't lament students transferring schools or majors when things work out ... well, maybe if you are the parent covering tuition costs and your kid keeps changing majors and turning school into a profession there may be some lamenting ... to the contrary, we often encourage them to find what works for them if the current path isn't.

Are you drawing a distinction with club, like the year-round guys, versus a travel baseball team that plays about 6 weeks or so in the summer after the high school season ends? Or are you considering those the same thing?

LCC won football and baseball in 2009, but last time basketball was at the state level along with football was 1999 and while football took state, basketball finished as runner up. Impressive!

A lot of the youth league stuff in the area tends to be Sundays to allow for the use of the high school fields with no need for worrying about potential conflicts since IHSAA doesn't allow high school stuff on the Sundays. I'm not so sure about conference-based in Harrison's case though as last season, Harrison's JV only played three games with NCC opponents and, the season before, it only ended up being two games within conference.

Only true believers can see it. 😃 http://www.ossaa.com/Football.aspx

Oklahoma has about 80 teams across two divisions that play 8-man. Here's a link to their IHSAA equivalent. Don't know if they have links to officiating mechanic guidelines or anything like that there, but it's a starting point.

I agree that Saturdays seem to have been the call for JV recently ... at least up north here. I don't know if that's tied to class or not. Harrison has, for the most part, played the bulk of its JV games on Saturdays.

Alleged photo taken in the Park Tudor parking lot on count day. 😃 Lord, I apologize for that there.

I think it could be, but it could also take out some smaller schools that might be willing to go through that maintenance or have nicer grass fields. I know that LCC's baseball field is a nice grass field for a 1A/2A school. The football field also holds up remarkably well for a grass field. For 1A/2A contests, I think it would be OK with parking ... although, historically, they have had to do grass parking for Pioneer and the re-start game against West Lafayette. My other concern for a turf requirements, and I'd probably need to take a look at @crimsonace1's map that he created for more clarity, is are there some 1A/2A schools that aren't close by some of those 6A/5A turf schools. It might be six-one-way, half-dozen-the-other on travel since they might be playing someone on the other end of the north or south part of the state, but at least in that travel component one gets to be home. I'd be interested in whether there's a difference in that thought process for smaller schools vs. larger schools too. Before I moved to Indy, I was a big-school football bigot. I came from a school in Texas that would be 6A classification in Indiana and would be top 10 in Indiana by enrollment. While home field was nice, being on the road wasn't really on the player's minds except in maybe a handful of schools. Since coming to Indiana, I've absolutely fallen in love with small-school ball and learned A LOT about the character across the classes and it seems to me, solely my opinion though with no statistical data behind it, that home field plays more in the psyche for smaller schools than larger on average. Sagarin has, for the last few years, provided less than 2 points advantage for home field ... last year it was just 1.28 for the whole state. I wonder if that's really evenly-distributed across the classes or, like I saw with big schools, at least in Texas, not that big a thing, but maybe much more for smaller class ball. Might that have an impact in which classes or programs all-out embrace neutral semi-state fields vs. those that are going to look much more at cost-benefit?

Is it a question of venue as opposed to just location? Jeff has been a "landing place" for basketball tourneys and post-season play. Similarly, I get the impression, when the IHSAA sets some of the regionals/sectionals etc. for baseball, it's as much about the venue as anything else. With that said, I'm merely asking as opposed to passing judgement on Washington's facilities vs. Seymour's as I'm not familiar with either school's facilities. I think the other issue with football, as you pointed out, is the aspect of maintenance up to the semi-state; especially among smaller schools. The cost to most 1A/2A and possibly 3A/4A of maintaining non-turf fields for two or three extra weeks would probably make it not worth hosting. The argument nowadays is that, at least if you go somewhere where the field is in disrepair for football post-season, it's kind of "baked-in" to the equation that you take what you get. If we went to neutral fields, there would HAVE to be, or at least should be, an expectation of a certainly level of amenities, field condition, etc. That expectation would probably take several schools out of WANTING to be considered. Obviously, turf fields make it easier for the maintenance, but there are even some turf fields that might be, arguably, better turf fields to play on post season than others. I suspect there would be much more grousing if the state went to neutral sites and field conditions/amenities were, within reason, less-than-stellar. It's kind of like $1 beer night at the local dive. No one asks what label it is and, even if it tastes like paint thinner and is sometimes warm, there will be little complaining. At $8 a glass, the expectation is ice cold and name-brand.

Works for me!

Can't say I'm going to miss Zionsville in that sectional with Harrison after the last two seasons.

There's always 28; especially when Chatard comes back. 😃

Already posted by @EasyEJay. See

Part of it is the increase in 1A teams which slides those at the top of 1A into 2A. Since the other classes, outside of 5A, have set numbers, there's a "trickle up" effect. That'll cause the lower-end cutoffs to be higher.

Unless someone sends the IHSAA an anonymous note stating that Breman is indeed named for Pope Breman VI ... hence the 'B' that looks like a '6' on the helmets. When that happens you shall mysteriously be cast into the Sectional of Death in 3A. 🙂

While there has been discussion on GID about larger Hispanic populations causing issues with football, I'm not sure that I buy it in whole. Demographic shifts are coming in broader swaths now. The country's recent numbers, at least as of 2020, show that, by national average, Whites are no longer the majority for public schools. They clock in at a tad under 46%. Hispanics check in at around 28%, with Blacks at around 15%. Asians, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and those that identify as two or more races complete the pie with a bit more than 11% combined. While Indiana is still below average with regard to URMs and way above the average in terms of Whites ... at just a bit under 66% ... there's still a shift in play. Going back to the idea that Hispanic students have a potential impact on the strength of football in an area because "obviously they play soccer and not American football," of note is that the states that have large Hispanic populations in their public schools, as a percentage, actually tend to be known for their football. Among the states with more Hispanics than the national average in their public schools are football power states California, Florida, and Texas with roughly 55%, 35%, and 53% Hispanic students respectively. At the same time, Nevada has around 43% Hispanic and New Mexico has roughly a whopping 63% and neither would likely be tagged as the strongest football schools in the sate. Someone could certainly pick New Mexico and say, "See the more Hispanics you have, the more irrelevant your program would be because no one talks about football and New Mexico in the same breath." On the other hand, the large numbers of Hispanics, as percentage, in powerhouse states says that we just can't flat-out assume a linear impact on football when there's larger presence of Hispanic students. While the idea of demographic shifts certainly provide challenges, I think there's plenty of data out there as well as trends that show that the trend toward increased Hispanic populations isn't specifically a death knell for football in an area/state. There's also a big issue that folks need to consider in that Hispanics are not as monolithic as they are often assumed to be ... folks who live in Florida can attest to this first-hand. There's also the issue of FRL that people toss in there as well, but there's also data that points to that being less than definitive in football success than the linear presumption than is sometimes assumed. Back in 2015/16, the national average for FRL was around 50%. California, Texas, and Florida clocked in around 59% on FRL. Note that in that year, Indiana's percentage was just a bit below the national average at around 48%. The interesting thing though is that Mississippi clocked in at right around 75% FRL. You might be asking, "Why would Mississippi matter?" Mississippi ranked 7th in 2015 in percentage of their players that went on to play FBS ball with scholarship. Incidentally, Florida was #1 in percentage and Texas and California ranked #12 and #11 respectively. Incidentally, last year, Mississippi also ranked #1 in D1 scholarships per million residents and also ranked #1. When the study broke down positions, that ranking was also #1 across QBs, line, DBs, and receivers. It was only a single study, but an interesting place to start. Caveat: With all that said, and given that various groups are not as monolithic and different specific areas/schools have very different cultures, coaching issues, communities, etc., this is very much high-level analysis. I'm not as directly versed with Hobart and/or Portage or many other Indiana schools, so my info above is more for thought as opposed to being directly applied to a specific school. Here are the various sources if folks want to delve into or churn the data a bit more: D1s per million ... https://thedatajocks.com/best-states-for-high-school-football/ FRL 2015/2016 ... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_204.10.asp 2020 ethnicity public schools ... https://www.statista.com/statistics/236244/enrollment-in-public-schools-by-ethnicity-and-us-state/ 2020 blue chips by state ... https://www.bannersociety.com/2020/2/4/21111828/college-football-recruits-by-state 2015 state rankings by percentage pop FBS ... https://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/sec-football/sec-states-produce-tons-of-fbs-talent/

George Karlaftis from West Lafayette ... attends Purdue for college. David Bell from Warren Central .. attended Purdue for college.

To be fair, the monkeys have had millennia of evolution to get to the current state. The IHSSA has only been flinging *poop* for a century or so. Lord, I apologize for that there.

That 5A north line is going to stretch further north in a couple of years. Based on the latest numbers, and assuming Cathedral gets bumped to 6A via SF this time around, Harrison would be the largest 5A in the state at that point. The Harrison area is on a growth spurt that will likely have it surpass Jeff in 6A, which would leave McCutcheon as the lone 5A school in Lafayette by the 2024 season.