MDAlum82

Considering the staff in question, yes, I guess it was an insult. Mea Culpa. However, MOST college programs have larger coaching staffs than most normal high schools could ever dream of, much less pay, so I think the one aspect of this scenario I would agree with is "better coaching overall"...

The "better coaching, training,..." comment depends entirely on the college in question, esp when it comes to education, often an after thought at many colleges. There are some high school programs whose facilities and staff can go toe to toe with many mid-level colleges, esp in Texas and down south in SEC country. Much is being made of "NIL" $ but when the dust settles, those who make real money - defined here as $25k/year, the avg difference in annual earnings btwn someone with a high school diploma and a Bachelor's degree, will be few and far btwn, IMHO. I may be wrong, won't be the first time. Your comment seems to assume there are no "selfish" college programs and coaches who care more about their needs than the needs of the recruit? Color me skeptical. College coaching staffs have far more to lose $$$ from underperformance than HS coaches. That certainly seemed to be the case of the young man who went to IU. IU needed a PG so they convinced him to come early, it did not turn out well. Who loses the most in this scenario, the athlete or the program/staff?

How much to I need to donate to shut off the inane "badges" alerts? Sheesh....

In the case of the PG & the IU B-ball team, the results were under-whelming. The common refrain was he "needed another year" to mature and be ready for the physicality of Big Ten basketball....maybe that is what his Sr year of high would have given him? Certainly the coaching was most likely better @ IU but he could have hit the weight room and matured physically in high school as easily as he could have at IU and not wasted his freshmen year of eligibility. Football is even more physically demanding.

Just saw this in our local sports coverage. Last season, a well-regarded PG left local EVV high school early to play for IU basketball team. Now comes news of a highly ranked QB from nearby O'boro HS leaving early "to play for Rutgers". Certainly he is not going to actually play this year so uncertain what the benefit would be to do this - other than avoiding injury. OWENSBORO, Ky. (WFIE) - Senior Gavin Wimsatt has played his last played his last football game with Owensboro High School. Officials with the school’s athletic department say Wimsatt is leaving to play for Rutgers. In April, Wimsatt committed to Rutgers, but this announcement means he’s leaving high school early. Got official confirmation this morning from @OHSsports athletic department, that senior QB @GavinWimsatt did indeed play his last game for Owensboro HS last night & he is leaving for Rutgers. Per OHS, Wimsatt is going to release a video message on social media sometime soon!

Sadly and somewhat remarkably, this is not the first time this has been done by the same cast of characters. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/highschool/2021/09/02/bishop-sycamore-football-another-suspicious-high-school-christians-of-faith/5670371001/ The craziest part of the Bishop Sycamore story isn't that a possibly fictitious school sprouted up in Columbus, Ohio, and started scheduling football games against a string of powerhouse programs around the country. It's that this had already been done before – and by many of the same people. Just three years ago, a school called Christians of Faith (COF) Academy was created in Columbus under dubious circumstances, with a football team serving as its lone public face. The school did not appear to have a legitimate physical address. It's unclear what schooling actually took place. And it was run by a similar cast of characters who have been involved with Bishop Sycamore – including Roy Johnson, who went on to become the head football coach at the current school before he was fired earlier this week. "It is using the exact same methods, the exact same schemes with the exact same people," said Ben Ferree, who investigated COF Academy during his previous job as the assistant director of officiating and sport management at the Ohio High School Athletic Association. "In some of Bishop Sycamore's early games in 2019, the first season that they played, they wore COF Academy's uniforms. So yeah, it is the exact same scam. They simply changed the name." Bishop Sycamore is facing scrutiny this week after its nationally televised football game against IMG Academy on Sunday. Bishop Sycamore's 58-0 loss, which was later revealed to be its second game in three days, left ESPN's commentators questioning if they'd been deceived by the school and expressing concern for the safety of its players. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has since pledged an investigation into Bishop Sycamore, to ensure it is meeting minimum educational requirements and complying with state law. Yet as Bishop Sycamore has started to unravel on a national stage, its ties to COF Academy have been somewhat overlooked. Years before Bishop Sycamore had the spotlight, the Ohio Department of Education shut down COF Academy after making an unannounced visit to its listed address and finding that it "was not open for instruction and had no pupils in attendance." Of the eight listed members of Bishop Sycamore's "staff and advisory board," five were also listed as staff members at COF Academy, according to annual reports filed with the Ohio Department of Education. 'AS FAR AS I KNOW, NONE OF THE KIDS DID ANY SCHOOL:' Questions mount over legitimacy of Bishop Sycamore BISHOP SYCAMORE DIRECTOR ON ESPN GAME: Football program is not a 'scam' Andre Peterson, who is Bishop Sycamore's founder and director, was not involved in running COF Academy, but his son played football for the school. He denies that Bishop Sycamore is anything other than a legitimate school. Meanwhile, COF Academy's leaders – Johnson and business partner Jay Richardson – have since faced a string of lawsuits alleging hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid loans and bills, according to court records obtained by USA TODAY Sports. Richardson, who does not appear to be involved with Bishop Sycamore, did not respond to multiple messages from USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday. Johnson replied to an emailed list of questions by claiming, "I spoke to USA TODAY already." He did not respond to a follow-up email. Lawsuit leads to money owed Johnson initially described COF Academy to local media outlets as an online Christian school that was being bankrolled by the Richard Allen Group, which he said was the financial arm of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In a 2018 article published by ThisWeek Community News, which is part of the USA TODAY Network, Johnson said COF Academy had hired about 50 teachers and would enroll about 500 students that fall. The school did not have a functioning website, clear academic infrastructure or school building at the time. And it listed its address as the headquarters of the AME Church Third District, though Johnson talked repeatedly of plans to build a large campus in Columbus, with construction funded by the church. "This is a passion project," he told ThisWeek in August 2018. "For the AME church, this wasn’t a make-money project." It didn't take long for it to fall apart. In September 2018, ThisWeek reported that the AME Church Third District had posted a statement on its website denying any affiliation with COF Academy or the Richard Allen Group. It turns out the Richard Allen Group, which Johnson had described as the church's financial arm, is actually an LLC formed in 2014 by Johnson and Richardson, a former NFL linebacker who played collegiately at Ohio State. Several months later, in November 2018, First Merchants Bank filed a lawsuit against both the Richard Allen Group and its co-founders after they took out a $100,000 loan on behalf of the AME Church to fund the COF Academy, then failed to repay it. According to records filed as part of the lawsuit, Johnson and Richardson represented themselves on loan application forms as the secretary and president of the AME Church, respectively. Johnson later admitted in a deposition that proceeds from the loan were distributed to a bank account held by Mjolnir Development, a fictitious trade name registered by the Richard Allen Group. He also acknowledged that there is no legal document that identifies the group as the financial arm of the church, though he and Richardson both claimed that the two entities had a relationship, according to filings in the civil case. Rev. Taylor Thompson, who is identified in the filings as the AME Church's treasurer, said in a deposition that the church never saw any of the money. "We have no affiliation with (the Richard Allen Group) on a legal, contractual or even an agreement basis," Arthur Harmon, an attorney for the church, added Wednesday. "All the things they did should have no reflection on the AME Church Third District." A judge granted the bank's motion for summary judgment in the case last week, ruling that Johnson and Richardson had engaged in "fraudulent misrepresentation," in part because they did not have attorneys and failed to respond to the bank's claims. A hearing has been scheduled for Nov. 18 to determine how much money Johnson and Richardson will now owe, including interest and legal fees. A Range Rover and unpaid hotel rooms That lawsuit is one of at least three involving Johnson, Richardson and/or the Richard Allen Group that alleges an unpaid loan or bill during the COF Academy's brief existence. In a second lawsuit, filed in August 2018, Heartland Bank sued the Richard Allen Group after it took out a loan of roughly $92,000 to purchase a 2017 Range Rover and failed to pay back the money. The group admitted to the allegation, and the car was seized and resold a few months later. It is unclear how much money Johnson and Richardson still owe the bank, if any. The third lawsuit, filed in May 2019, alleged that Johnson and COF Academy had an outstanding balance of $110,685 at a Baymont Inn & Suites, where they rented rooms for three months. The lawsuit was dropped after the hotel's lawyer struggled to serve Johnson with the complaint and failed to apprise the court of his efforts to do so. The hotel's lawyer did not respond to an email from USA TODAY Sports inquiring whether the balance was ever repaid. Records in all three lawsuits show the plaintiffs repeatedly struggled to locate or contact Johnson to notify him of the litigation, prolonging the various proceedings. Separately, Johnson told ThisWeek in 2019 that he was the subject of a U.S. Secret Service investigation pertaining to COF Academy. He said he had been informed that the investigation was closed. "Because we didn't do anything wrong," Johnson said at the time. "Specifically, myself, I didn't fraud the church. I didn't fraud these kids. I didn't fraud anybody like that. That's what the federal investigators were looking at, and that's what they found." When asked about Johnson's claims, a spokesperson for the Secret Service – which is tasked with investigating potential financial crimes in addition to protecting the president – told USA TODAY Sports in an email Wednesday that it "does not confirm the existence or absence of a potentially ongoing investigation." 'Didn't pass the smell test' Peterson told USA TODAY Sports this week that his school is a new entity, separate from the COF Academy. "COF closed down, and then I started Bishop Sycamore in 2019," he said. Corporate records in Ohio confirm that the "Bishop Sycamore Foundation" was registered as a nonprofit in August 2019. But Peterson had also started talking publicly about the new school before the proverbial dust had even settled on the old one. "I liked the concept of what Roy was trying to do," Peterson told ThisWeek in early 2019. "Me and some of the other parents and some of the people that were involved decided to continue that." Johnson told the outlet at the time that he helped Bishop Sycamore set up its website but "his attorneys have told him he 'can't really be involved' " with the new school. In its early days, Bishop Sycamore tried to associate itself with a legitimate school in Columbus called YouthBuild. But YouthBuild backed out of a potential partnership before it was finalized, according to The Washington Post, and later sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bishop Sycamore when the school continued to publicly tout a relationship with YouthBuild. The website for YouthBuild Columbus now features a prominent disclaimer at the top of its home page: "YBCCS IS IN NO WAY AFFILIATED WITH BISHOP SYCAMORE." Like COF Academy before it, Bishop Sycamore has been accused of fielding players who are older than 18 or have used up their allotted four years of eligibility. At least twoschools cited these reasons when canceling games against Bishop Sycamore in 2019. Others declined to play them at all. "When they were Christians of Faith, they wanted to play us, but we didn’t schedule them because of all the nuances and all the mystery behind the place," said Tom Lombardo, the football coach at St. Edward (Lakewood, Ohio) High School. "We always knew that there was something that didn’t quite pass the eye and smell test, but none of what they said has turned out to be true." Peterson denied claims that players on the current team are over age. He said some of them are juniors and seniors who have reclassified, the practice of staying back or jumping up a school year for the purpose of athletics. "It’s always been done, but just not on the scale to where people really cared or noticed," he said. 'Doing the same thing' On multiple occasions in the course of a 45-minute interview this week, Peterson told USA TODAY Sports that Bishop Sycamore has existed for four years, only to later say it was actually founded in 2019. He said he has poured "thousands of dollars" of his own money into the school, and denies that it is a scam. "If this is a fraud, then I’m the dumbest fraudster ever," he said. "I put money in this. I don’t get money out of it and it was never designed to do that for me. It was always designed to be able to try to help these kids." Few details exist about Bishop Sycamore, either in the most recent annual report it filed with the state of Ohio or its website, in which the "About Us" and "Staff" sections were blank before the entire site was taken down. Peterson said tuition at the school costs $2,000 and that the plan prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to use a "blended learning" environment, where schooling predominantly takes place online as "one of the ways to streamline the cost of what we do." He said there are no full-time teachers, but coaches and other adults hang around the students to make sure work gets done. He also said the student body consists of between 75 and 80 students, about 95% of whom play sports. In its most recent annual report filed with the state, for the 2020-21 academic year, Bishop Sycamore reported a total enrollment of three. It has until Sept. 30 to file its annual report for 2021-22. "They are doing the same thing that they did (at) COF," former COF Academy player Ar'mon Mackey wrote in a Twitter direct message to USA TODAY Sports on Tuesday. "They lied to me and screwed me over. When I (saw) the Bishop Sycamore stuff, I was telling players that it’s not legit, but they didn’t listen to me." What's next? The future of Bishop Sycamore – and its one-time head coach – is now unclear. Johnson has an active warrant out for his arrest stemming from a 2020 domestic violence incident, Delaware County (Ohio) Sherriff's Office director of public relations Tracy Whited confirmed to USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday. According to court records, Johnson's girlfriend told police that he pushed her and hit her in the lip. Johnson denied touching her but spent three days in jail. USA TODAY Sports does not name victims of domestic assault without their permission. Johnson later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, criminal mischief, and was placed on probation. A warrant was issued for his arrest on July 2 after he failed to meet some of the conditions of his probation, according to court records. As for Bishop Sycamore, at least four schools had pulled out of their scheduled games against the school as of Tuesday evening, some citing concerns over liability or safety. And the department of education investigation that Gov. DeWine announced Tuesday is likely to uncover more details about the nature of Bishop Sycamore's educational offerings. The Canton Police Department also said Wednesday it had received a report of two invalid checks totaling $3,596 at a hotel where the team rented 25 rooms last week. It has identified two suspects in the case, according to The Canton Repository. "You hear their story, you go, ‘OK, all right, it sounds like you want to do good,' " said Ray Holtzclaw, whose son, Judah, briefly played for Bishop Sycamore. "Then the example they set for the kids is, ‘OK, we’re not going to pay our bill. We’re just going to walk away and get somewhere else.’ You can’t keep doing that with kids that are watching you." Holtzclaw said he was left on the hook for a four-figure hotel bill earlier this year, which Bishop Sycamore promised to reimburse and never did. Meanwhile, in March, a new lawsuit hit the docket in Franklin County, filed against Johnson and Peterson. A transportation company alleges the two men hired buses from the past year on behalf of a charity called "ISE Foundation," which does not exist as a legal entity in Ohio. The company, Cardinal Transportation, claims Johnson and Peterson now owe it roughly $13,000. The bill, at least according to court records, has yet to be paid. Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad. Follow Chris Bumbaca and Lorenzo Reyes at @BOOMbaca and @LorenzoGReyes.

Not certain why Castle gets "the best defense in the SIAC" - tag at this point?? Certainly they have an excellent run defense but, ultimately, they gave up over 200 yds in the air to MD and 3 TDs to drop the game. MD defense was equally tough against Castle, allowing < 140 total yds total offense. By comparison, Mater Dei defense has given up only 21 pts this season, the same amount Castle D yielded in 2nd half & OT in the loss. I would give the nod to Central's offense over 0 - 2 North offense at this point in the season but that may change as season wears on. Castle D is very good, no doubt, but not yet worthy of "Best Defense in SIAC" tag yet, IMHO.

This picture was taken on shores of Kenai Lake, one of several stops in/around Seward/Kenai Peninsula. We also spent time in Denali & the Matanuska Glacier area... definitely a place everyone should visit at least once in their lives, IMHO.

Going well, thx for asking. Just got back from our much delayed 2020 vacation - 10 days in Alaska with the family. Now THAT is God's country...

My only reason for posting this is to break up the seemingly uninterrupted string of Tiger fan posts...that, and to give a shout out to Tango, patriarch of the eastern branch of the family tree who floated across Pigeon Crick awhile back and never found their way home...🤧 Hope your Summer is going well, Tango!

Amen Bobref. The next logical step needed to improve the Success Factor would be the use of a longer period of time, preferably a "rolling" 3-4 year period, that would adjust annually. Under such a system, the effects would be immediate and would not affect students 1-2 2 years removed from the "success" they had nothing to do with.

Total domination by the WEBO line last night. No one had man-handled MD the way WEBO did last night. Best of luck in LOS next week. Championship trifecta?

I see another Defensive battle in the works this week. In the end, Mater Dei finds a way to make WEBO wobble just enough to eke out 13 - 7 victory. 😸 Safe travels to everyone heading out to a Semi-state game this wknd.

Thank you taking the time to craft a thorough, thoughtful response. If these "advantages" are so great and so obvious, why don't they manifest themselves in other sports? This argument flies directly in the face of those who, unable to support their "Obvious P/P Advantage Thesis (bias?) with real-world data, resort to the "you just don't want to admit you have them" defense. There is an easily proven variation in success btwn and among each "group" - Publics, Privates & Parochial schools, that varies from sport to sport, conference to conference, - all over Indiana.

Impressive showing from SR last night. Size may intimidate but speed KILLS. Good luck vs Danville next week.

Man, is Southridge F-A-S-T. They are at an obvious size dis-advantage on both lines but no matter, they are just running around LB on both sides of the ball leaving LB gasping - and grasping - for air.

Kudos to anyone who can appropriately tie a vague Vonnegut reference to a discussion of high school football but, in this case, it fits.

Is this another "sleeper" Luers team that has a less than stellar season record, due to tough FW area competition, and then rolls through the 2A tournament?

Just to be clear, I am not asserting any poor sportsmanship on behalf of WeBo here. The rules are the rules. Friday night @730 is as good as any day/time, just happy to be playing one more week of football at this pt.

In my opinion, this is an element of "gamesmanship" the game would be better off without. As long as it is allowed, or at east not prohibited, coaches will use it to their advantage. However, until someone at the IHSA grows pair and takes a stand on issues like this, they will not go away. Putting Regionals & Semi-State games at neutral sites is the next big step the IHSAA needs to take to improve the tournament. This is where the travel times are the greatest and thus, the safety of the players travelling is of most concern - or should be. Every team "earns" their way to these games and can thus lay claim to the right to host. Neutral sites at reasonable start times for both team would be an improvement.

Thanks for info. Looks like weather will not have an affect on either team, which is preferable. Let both teams play their game and see what happens. Curious, do you still play on grass? I watched the 2nd half of last night's game and you simply wore out the HC Defense. They had no real solution for your running game and looked gassed mid-3rd qtr. Webo reminds me of local Sectional 40 nemesis. Southridge. Strong running game with timely passing and strong D. Few mistakes; TOs, penalties, etc.

Sagarin & Harrel's both had Heritage Christian as the favorite over WeBo and that did not turn out so well. While it is nice to be favored, MD will have to earn this on the field. I tried to view some of the film from last night's game btwn WeBo & HR but internet is wonky today. WeBo stats show a strong running game and stout D. MD will certainly have it's hands full this week. I will wait a few days to see likely weather & game time before concocting some Wildcat Homer-ish argument to justify why I think MD will win. Fingers crossed, rabbit's foot in hand...

This game was a real battle of the defenses. Both D's were stout but MD made just enough plays - & FGs - to come out on top. MD moves on to face a very strong WeBo team next week in what will be another tough match up. Before we move on however, I want to congratulate TC for a great season. The sportsmanship TC displayed after the game was refreshing. After the last snap, several TC players mingled with MD players, congratulating them, shaking hands and even embracing each other. When the Regional trophy was presented, several TC players could be be seen standing nearby clapping. Very classy by TC.

My initial thought is I hope the weather is nothing like the last time MD came to Webo field back in 1997... Temps in low 20's, 20+ mph winds, blowing across the field... BITTER cold.🥶 For those of us who will not be able to get a ticket to the games, does Webo typically have a live stream available for home games?

Yes, on the Triton Central sports network.