Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Classic example of the hypocrisy is the debacle of Gilman football a few years ago. Old Poogy recruited top football players who overwhelmed and destroyed the other MIAA schools, Their solution, not play Gilman in Football. While they are on the winning end with recruitment, alls ok,,,soon as they start getting beaten by bigger and stronger players, quit... And that is at the High School level not youth.

Not quite. Poggi recruited from across the country for athletics, and brought in kids who were physically exceptional - much bigger, stronger, and faster than the other kids in the MIAA.

If a recruiting pool is a roughly 20 mile radius surrounding a school, the coach can expect a certain number of strong athletes to matriculate each year around which to build a team and a program, and expects to compete with other schools with the same constraints.

If the recruiting pool is the entire US, then it isn't an MIAA team anymore - it is a US team, and it looks more like college recruiting than a local high school. It was like a D3 school playing an NFL team. - it wasn't just unfair, it was unsafe.

There were other problems with the approach. Parents who had paid tuition since lower school suddenly had to watch the ringers come in and displace the kids who had grown up in the school. Kids who were solid players in middle school were unable to play much in upper school due to the recruiting program.

It was costly - the coach insisted on a certain number of scholarships each year in order to feed the machine he built.

It caused problems in school, as many of the recruited players struggled with rigorous academics.

Other schools complained, but the MIAA couldn't do much. Eventually, the other schools saw the only choice was to opt out.

Notice they didn't stop playing the other MIAA teams - just the one that had an unfair advantage.

Eventually, things changed. Poggi moved on. The other MIAA A conference teams returned to playing against Gilman.

Sounds like the MIAA schools and their holdbacks didnt want to play against bigger and more athletic High School students from Gilman. I guess it is ok when the holdbacks in youth have the advantage and are running over on age youth players, not so OK when someone else ups the ante against them in HS and turns the table.....Total Hypocrisy of holdbacks .