Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

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D6sportsfan8819
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Re: Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

Post by D6sportsfan8819 »

Enjoy your watered down victory then. 
BasketballFan12345
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Re: Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

Post by BasketballFan12345 »

Find one kid on that BG basketball team that hasn’t grown up within 10 mins of the school and didn’t come up through grade school and I’ll consider debating with some of you guys. I guess while PIAA addresses this topic, they might as consider giving out participation trophies to the 0 win teams too or the well below .500 teams because they “deserve it”
FunFacts
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Re: Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

Post by FunFacts »

BasketballFan12345 wrote:You’re ludicrous if you compare teams like Guilfole abs Carroll to teams like Lincoln Park, Kennedy and Math Civics and Sciences. If you want to be the best, you got to work hard and beat the best including the “recruiting Catholic” schools in D6. Just cause they have a bunch of good kids grow up through their system and they are good means they should be penalized with playing Lincoln Park in a different league playoff?? Imagine if guilfoyle wasn’t a catholic school and they were just a regular public school. They’d have the same players previously and right now and no one would complain at all just because they aren’t a “catholic” school. Still speaking b-ball terms...
So if you they do split the playoffs and BG has to play Lincoln Park, what is the big deal?  If you want to be the best, you got to work hard and beat the beat including the “recruiting charter” schools.    Correct? 
BasketballFan12345
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Re: Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

Post by BasketballFan12345 »

What’s the big deal with public and Charter schools now? JV beat Saint Joes and BC?
Blueandwhitefan
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Re: Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

Post by Blueandwhitefan »

BasketballFan12345 wrote:Find one kid on that BG basketball team that hasn’t grown up within 10 mins of the school and didn’t come up through grade school and I’ll consider debating with some of you guys. I guess while PIAA addresses this topic, they might as consider giving out participation trophies to the 0 win teams too or the well below .500 teams because they “deserve it”
When BG played HC in football, WCCS radio did a study. They took the home town of the kids on both teams and compared populations.  I dont remember the exact numbers, but. Homer city and Center twp is around 4000. The populations of the BG football players was roughly 160,000. Altoona alone is 44,000. Now that's a fair matchup in demographics. (Sarcasm)
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CCDevil2012
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Re: Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

Post by CCDevil2012 »

BasketballFan12345 wrote: Guilfoyle’s entire b-ball roster was raised up within that school district 
Can you please enlighten us as to where this district’s boundaries are? 
D6sportsfan8819
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Re: Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

Post by D6sportsfan8819 »

You all have your feelings. We all have ours. When you have a majority of this years district six titles won by public schools, it’s a bad look to complain about the ones that the “cheating catholic schools” win. 
HSD6FAN
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Re: Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

Post by HSD6FAN »

BG dominating West Branch this year isn’t completely about private vs. public. The lopsided playoffs within district 6 is more about the poor classification system. Six classes in the state is way too many.

Private / Charter vs. public is a problem, but I don’t believe it had a lot to do with district 6 basketball this year. District 6, no. The rest of the state, absolutely.

On a side note, saying most of the team has played together since elementary school isn’t always convincing. You only need 5 guys and if you have 5 or 6 good players and get 1 or 2 transfers that are studs, you go from a good team to a state contender.


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Steve92
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Re: Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

Post by Steve92 »

I'm not writing this to defend what Kennedy Catholic did last year or to propose that some private/charter schools don't bring in athletes from all corners of the earth.  I write this as a partial defense of BG football and basketball. 
It would be nice if this issue was as simple as saying that BG draws its athletes from a population pool of 144,000.  If that were true, we could all just be really content with our anger.  But it's a bit more complex than that.  BG does not have geographical boundaries to its enrollment, but it certainly does have boundaries.   144,000 residents represents a certain number of families with kids.   Most of those families have no interest in sending their kids to a Catholic school.  So let's pick a number and scratch a huge percentage from the 144,000.  Some of the families/kids prefer the social atmosphere of a larger school.  Some prefer the greater diversity of course offerings at Altoona and Hollidaysburg.  Some wouldn't be caught dead wearing a blazer or jumper to school.  Some don't want the more stringent discipline or to submit to drug testing.  Some parents can't or don't want to pay 7 grand/year/pupil.  The result is that the population pool from which BG draws its kids is very small, in fact, it only supports about 80 students/class.  That's a very small pool and it's overwhelmingly the ever-shrinking Altoona and Hollidaysburg area Parochial schools. 
But wait, you say, they can't get those outstanding athletes from such a small population base.  Ordinarily, no, but any school can have anomaly years.  BG didn't win a district football championship between the late 80's and '14.  There were some good and some bad years in there, in fact Wheeler's first year was one of the worst.  There were a bunch of mediocre years.  During that stretch no one seemed to scream about unfairness.  BG basketball has had its down years too. 
If we want to make the charge that BG has an unfair advantage, the question shouldn't be how big is its "district" or its population base, because it's obviously very small.  The question should be:  Are they drawing from the same population base during the good and bad runs?  If the good runs are fueled by student-athletes that come in from outside the normal pool and attend only to hop on an athletic bandwagon then I would agree that they have an unfair advantage. 
How would I judge that?  If the kid went to the parochial feeder schools it's all good.  If extended family attended attended BG, I'd include them in the "district".   If a  family moves into the Altoona area and the non-athletic siblings also attend, I have no problem with it.  If a top athlete moved into the system in high school and his/her siblings don't attend BG, then the kid came from outside the "district" and represents an unfair advantage.  How prevalent is that at BG?
The first football championship was pure and clean.  No one should take that away from them.   McCloskey, the Chadbourns, the Leamers, Berger, those all-state players came from the same population that gave BG the lousy and mediocre seasons.   After that a couple of kids came in.  Last year the football team had two kids who many would point out came from outside the traditional base.  No argument there.  I can't answer how unfair that might be compared to kids moving around between public schools.   I also don't pretend to have a solution to the schools who do load up their teams with outside talent. 
I don't see that kind of influx on this year's BG hoops squad.  I don't know all the families and don't want to question the histories of current individual players, but from what I know it looks pretty clean. 
There is a problem around the state, but before we take a systemic problem and make a knee-jerk condemnation of a certain school or team based upon dominance in a certain year, we should make an effort to know a bit about that school or team.  
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Re: Thursday Scoreboard 2-28-19

Post by CCDevil2012 »

The area is “obviously” very small? Besides the obvious 6A and 5A schools BG directly neighbors, they had a transfer last year who played at Huntingdon, so clearly 7k/year is not that big of a deterrent. Regardless of how big or small you think their “district” is, it doesn’t change the fact that chances are of 160,000 people, you’ll find a few who are able to afford the tuition. This is also assuming that BG offers zero scholarships, which they do, not just for athletes, but they do. West Branch SD serves a population of 7,500. This number doesn’t vary by anything other than how many births, deaths, and family moves occur. It’s not speculative of “well there’s tuition, and some kids want a big school atmosphere so that takes a chunk, oh and there’s the blazer, and the drug tests. So really they pull from a population of way less than 144,000, that’s why they only have 80 kids per class.” That’s so bogus. I don’t care if they have open boundaries, but they should not be compared to other A and AA schools because it’s not the same. If Cam Collins wanted to transfer to BG this year, what was stopping him? If what you were saying was true, then there would be an equal representation of teams in every sport’s state playoff. But when 10-20% of the schools always make up to 50+% of the brackets, you gotta wonder why. I don’t care about a separate playoff, but the classification system needs some tuning. 
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