A League Of Their Own?

"I would hope the NJSIAA doesn't turn its back on what 50 percent of its membership is saying,"

... by ignoring what the other 50% said?

Personally, I don't think public and private schools should be playing against each other unless the private schools then need to go on to play against college teams during playoffs.

But, that was a stupid way to try and make an argument.

I wonder if both Montclair and Bloomfield, good-sized towns on their own, lose any athletes of their own to powers like Bosco, BC and Delbarton. I kind of doubt it. So much of this "movement" by disgruntled schools smacks of sour grapes. During the Clary Anderson era, after all, people purposely moved TO Montclair so their sons could play under him. (Perhaps today's transplanted Brooklynites simply aren't as jockish.)

Also, it really is an effort directed at but a few schools. Catholic high schools like QP, St. Mary's and Montclair's own Immaculate are hardly recruiting giants. Ditto for private institutions like MKA and Newark Academy.

To some extent, this just is certain public schools envying the success of certain private schools. And, GNM, why shouldn't public schools play private ones in general? There simply aren't enough Catholic high schools with similar enrollments in this area to constitute a league for a school like Queen of Peace. And isn't the idea of exposing both schools to "diversity" a good one. I can also think of at least six former Catholic high schools which once fielded teams but no longer even exist. Surely those that have survived deserve to have a chance to play?

There's also, I suspect, even if it's only muttered, a certain element of mild anti-Catholic bigotry (the traditional "anti-semitism of liberals, after all) in this. No one is saying that Lawrenceville, Hun and Peddie should be punished or "broken up" in any sport, it's specifically a handful of Catholic academies like Bosco, Seton Hall Prep, Delbarton and CBA.

That Rutgers recruits so successfully from NJ's Catholic high schools (especially from Don Bosco, is but an added benefit of today's situation, of course. (Penn and Harvard also owe great debts of late to NJ's Catholic high schools for their athletic success. But they also owe it to Elizabeth High, the largest in the state, which has an enrollment larger than most Ivy colleges.)

Cathar,

I have to admit that when I was thinking about this issue schools like Delbarton came to mind. Not MKA or Immaculate.

Back in my days as HS Nose Tackle, I remember our team having a mostly winning record against other "Township" high Schools but getting thoroughly trounced whenever we played the likes of Delbarton which seemed to have an endless supply of semi-pros against our good first line, decent second line, and bench warming third stringers.

So, I guess the trick then would be to set up some sort of secondary league for schools such as you mentioned above that *do* recruit and give athletic scholarships while allowing private schools that don't employ these practices to keep playing the townies. Of course, that would result in either a national league instead of state wide or the secondary league would be ridiculously small.

Just as an FYI: My feelings on the subject stem from the "level playing field" perspective, not any sort of anti-Catholic agenda. Religion in general rarely plays any role in my day to day thinking to the point where I can't even really say I've got a bias against it.

The only way you get better is by playing against people better than you.

If the public schools pull out because the private schools are "too good", then they do a disservice to the public school kids who stand to benefit from the experience of playing against them.

Get used to it, kids. Life has no shortage of people who are better than you at something, but that doesn't mean you stop trying to beat them. Winning wouldn't mean anything if it wasn't hard to do.

Don't give in to these sore "athletic directors" who just want to take their balls and go home.

I like Piro's quote about having to be "concerned about the safety of my players".
Are those big mean fish- eating Papists putting the non-believers in the hospital on a regular basis? If so, I sure haven't heard about it.

GNM, schools have always recruited. During the Clary Anderson era at MHS (which was, I admit, likely before you were even born), people were in fact urged to move to Montclair because of its successful (and then almost all-male) athletic programs.

As for prep schools, the bonafide boarding kind like Peddie and Lawrenceville, they've always recruited as per their specific position needs, too. They've even done so by the scabrous (I usually feel) tactic of the extra "post-graduate" year. Yet since they rarely if ever played public high schools, no one expressed outrage.

As Captain Vegetable and croiagusanam (in his special way which always has a refreshing whiff of 1967 Belfast on a Saturday night down on the High Street) both point out, what is really necessary to take on the likes of Bergen Catholic and to beat them is to build one's own program. This shouldn't be terribly hard in towns the size of Montclair and Bloomfield, respectively. Or in Elizabeth. Clifton for many years by its sheer numbers similarly dominated the old Passaic Valley Conference. So when a Lyndhurst (the senior year of their future Notre Dame and Giants star Tommy Luongo) took on and defeated big bad Clifton, the town and many other smaller opponents rejoiced at the fulfillment of the "prophecy." (It was sort of the Kol Nidre come to life on the gridiron!)

As I tried to indicate, GNM, I just don't think there are enough Catholic private schools left to form genuine leagues at any enrollment grouping. And the non-Catholic private schools only wish to play each other, certainly not nests of Papishes (with a respectful nod again to croiagusanam here) or even, Episcopalianism forbid, public schools.

So perhaps some realignment of leagues might be in order, if at all possible. But the rumblings of guys like Porcelli snd others quoted in the Star-Ledger story are merely the resentments of losers. (This season. If the Mounties had beaten St. Peter's, for example, someone like Porcelli might understandably never shut up for an entire year.)

Even should such realignments prove feasible in some instances, however, I doubt very much that, say, a bona fide public school football power like Hackensack or a basketball one like Elizabeth would really want to forego the possibility of playing Catholic schools. Instead, they properly focus on strengthening their own programs.

Maybe the issue here is that most of the aforementioned private schools are much better schools overall than their public counterparts.

This fact is reflcted in all aspects of the schools performance-- not just athletically. One important point to keep in mind is that private school select ALL of their students. So why shouldn't they look for a few good athletes? These schools, the religious ones in particular,do not receive public funding. Benefactors, most of them alumni, are the lifeblood of the schools. What better way to keep donations up than by fieding competitive athletic teams?

In addition to this, most of these private schools (especially the Catholic ones) are much smaller than the public schools. They are, in terms of the pool of people they draw from, like small, rural hamlets when compared to places like Bloomfield and Montclair.

The NJISAA has rules regarding te recruitment, coaching and eligibility of athletes. I agree, sounds like sour grapes to me.

You're good...you win

You stink...you lose

Simple....Who cares!

Many other state seperate private schools from public schools. It makes perfect sense as private schools have no geographical borders and can actively recruit top athletes. They should definitely be broken out into seperate leagues and playoff brackets. I am happy to see public schools finally getting the idea to opt out to make this long overdue change happen.

Cheese_with_, for a long time the Catholic high schools played in their own groupings, the public schools in theirs and the relatively few genuine prep schools like Lawrenceville & Hun in their own (which in their specific cases included mainly out-of-state opponents, since there have never been enough boarding and "country day" schools here to play each other).

But, maybe 20-25 years ago, the state of NJ wanted to extend its power to all high school sports. It was encouraged to do so by public schools which wanted to fatten up on Catholic schools (Don Bosco wasn't near the power it is today). And also by Catholic schools because so many had closed, leaving the remaining few with no leagues to play in.

The current league structures are a result of both an attempt to match enrollment sizes and geographic realities. Almost no Papist schools in this state save wealthy Bosco (which has travelled as far as CA for a game) and maybe Delbarton would ever be able to afford to travel expenses of going way across this state in search of other (nominally, anyway) Roman Catholic opponent schools.

SO this translates, however inadvertently, into a piece of anti-Catholic legislation. (It is not aimed at the likes of either MKA or Peddie, it is aimed at a handful of high-profile Catholic high schools while the Papist reality is really more St. Mary's of Rutherford or St. Joseph of Hammonton, schools which I assure you cannot "recruit" in any meaningful way other than crossing their fingers and praying that a kid 3 towns away has parents who can afford their tuition.) And of much, disgraceful, sour grapes. Why the Star-Ledger seems to be for it I don't understand.

You also seem more than a bit naive about the realities of high school recruiting by our state's public high schools. But the Ledger's sports pages are replete with small items about investigations of students "moving," especially but not solely for basketball. Yes, too, many of these incidents do prove to be highly questionable in nature, whatever the sport.

Private schools do have geographical borders of a sort, too. (Don Bosco long ago was a boarding school in that about 25% of its students were boarders, but those days are long gone.) Realistically, a Catholic high school draws its students from within its own county at the widest, with perhaps some from another neighboring one if the school is close to that other county's borders.

A network of school buses that truly crosses county lines is expensive. Only Don Bosco and probably Delbarton really have any such thing. You keep adding up all the realities of the situation and yes, it does sound like anti-Catholicism gussied up to sound like somethihg more "equitable" to public h.s. athletes. But it is not, amd more and more as I think it through it sounds too like a plan aimed almost specifically at Don Bosco and Delbarton. Certainly, schools ike St. Mary's and Queen of Peace and Montclair's own Immaculate are no grave threats to athletic parity save as they develop their own teams for specific seasons and whomever their opponents.

That Catholic schools do not attempt to note this, however, probably speaks much to their desperate desire to remain assimilated within the social fabric of NJ education. Whereas places like Lawrenceville and Hun probably just don't give a crap because their grads and students alike are already settled enough within their own social bastions of class and income. (Wake up, then, and smell the condescension!)

As I understand it, and I am admitedly no expert, basketball became a big sport in Catholic schools around these parts years ago because it did not require a huge investment in facilties and equipment. I'm told that many Catholic schools fielded football teams as well, and were for the most part cuffed about on a regular basis by the publics. There was no complaining then by the RCs about being stomped routinely, and the publics made no overtures to take it easy on them. Now that the worm has turned to some extent in some few schools (the majority of Catholic schools being non-players in the title quest), it is suddenly unfair. I've been to Delbarton's campus and it is spectacular. I've also been to Montclair Immaculate's, and it is not. I'd venture to say that there are far more schools like the latter.
I lloked up the top 20 NJ football schools yesterday, and 7 of them were Catholic schools. Is that an example of domination? I don't know. And does it extend to any sports outside of football and basketball? Are they dominating field hockey, tennis, swimming, track, etc., or don't those sports count? And isn't this all about boys sports, after all, as though girls sports don't matter?
To me, it looks very much like whining, which I guess is a factor in athletics these days. It is unseemly, however. I would rather just take my lumps, get better, and come back and beat the snot out of you next time instead of whinging about how it isn't fair.

Guy,
I see your points, but I respectfully disagree. You can rule out the catholic bais in my case since I am catholic and as to the whining side of things I really don't think that is part of the issue. Just as we group schools by size when considering competition, so should we discern as to the difference in recruiting potential. Sure there are private schools that don't recruit (or at least don't so it well), but those that do have a decided advantage (in most years) over those who don't. Yes the occaisional player moves to be in a particular district, but that is by far the exception. I am just advocating keeping the playing field level, and the top tir private school teams (and all private schools if they so chose) have a very large advantage/potential advantage when it comes to sports.

The playing field is always level, Cheese_with_. The success on a yearly basis of assorted athletic programs is not. Those h.s. athletic directors who complain now, yes, they are little more than abject whiners. As I also tried to suggest, very few private schools of any kind have a potential advantage in athletic competition. (My own experiences in college football proved to me that "stars" at, say, Deerfield Academy or Choate generally proved nothing more than journeymen in college when compared to guys from public and parochial schools alike in western PA, LI and even northern NJ.)

I have suggested some realignment of conferences should be in order. But it should not be at the expense of geographic sanity. It really is a case of "tough darts, too, if a school like Montclair or Nutley loses to a Catholic high school on a regular basis. Improve your own program, I'd say. (And your academics, as another poster above noted, there's more than one reason Bergen Catholic and Delbarton seem to serve as feeder schools for the Ivy League.)

Nor did I ever suggest that you are anti-Catholic, Cheese_with_..., just that somewhat inadvertently this move comes off as specifically anti-Catholic in nature. (It is, again, not at all aimed at the likes of MKA or Newark Academy, they simply don't win often enough yet to scare the whiners however admirable their programs are.) There is quite a difference, even if the bozos at the Star-Ledger don't seem to recognize it.

Croiagusanam, you are of course right in your assertions above. It basically is just a matter of grousing about football dominance. Even re basketball, however, public and private schools alike all over the country fundamentally line up to play St. Anthony's of Jersey City. And this is a financially pressed school that does no "recruiting" outside of the JC-Bayonne-Union City area, but rather relies on the truly great coaching skills and inspirational ability of the Hurley family to build a nationally respected program focused on inner-city kids. Whinging Mr. Porcelli at Montclair might wish to try something like that himself, since it's something Montclair formerly had in most sports during the Clary Anderson era.