Time To Treat The Symptoms Of NLC Disparity
October 9, 2021 at 4:04 a.m.
Time To Treat The Symptoms Of NLC Disparity
By Chip Davenport-
I scratched the surface last week discussing problematic issues in sub-varsity gridiron game scheduling, and the Northern Lakes Conference’s recent growing disparity at the varsity football level.
It was a broad net the caller and I cast in a 50-minute dialogue, and I had to restrain my immediate compulsion and excitement to address it. It was time to end my lunch hour.
Instead, I’ll ask the rhetorical question, “What’s wrong with (selected) NLC sports?” A brutally honest, middle-aged columnist is not capable of giving you the answers. In fact, given my tone, you might even be muttering, “…and sanctimonious” under your breath while you read.
This challenge literally takes a village.
I’ll set some parameters for you to examine. May I suggest, to keep people running off the rails with excuses, we break it down factually among these four Cs only: Conditioning, Commitment, Community, Consistency.
I intentionally omitted coaching because it’s a fifth “C” people will, unfairly in most cases, use as a cop out to avoid introspection, and to avoid being honesty brokers among themselves.
The four Cs I listed for you put the onus on the athletes, families, and collective athletic communities to be painfully honest about a school district’s community, its culture, and its behaviors in relation to high- and under-performing athletic programs.
In the meantime, I’ll give you my opinions on the matter among selected sports. If you already appreciate my honesty, I hope you continue to appreciate it when it hits closer to home.
The most disparate sports in the NLC are girls’ track and field (Warsaw, Northridge, and all others far behind), girls’ basketball (Warsaw, Northridge, Goshen [recently], and all others behind), girls’ soccer (Warsaw, Northridge, Goshen, and five distant followers), and football. The latter has three bottom teams far behind the top four with limited signs of near-term improvement. A fourth (Northridge) tends to hit a downward spiral once a few key players incur injuries.
It will behoove you to look on the NLC website to see the point distribution among the boys’ and girls’ all sports trophy points: again, Northridge, and Warsaw stand out among the rest of the schools who jockey for the third through eighth spots among several sports. You’ll see it in the points earned.
Rivalries aren’t rivalries when the most recent win by one of the two schools spans more than a decade, or even when there might be one win by one of the combatants in the last decade.
Let’s look at girls’ track and field. Warsaw’s conference titles stretch back to the 2000’s. The Warsaw Tigers’ toughest dual meet opponents in this sport are… other Warsaw Tigers racing in the varsity heats.
When you watch the conference meet each mid-May at the Tiger Athletic Complex you see Warsaw’s overwhelmingly greater participation levels begetting depth and begetting multi-decade *yawn* dominance. Furthermore, Northridge has begun to distance itself from the third-place finisher by dozens of points.
What symptoms can we detect from such lopsided dual meet and invitational scores? Exhaustion of two teams (the Tigers, Northridge) overwhelmingly leading the pack in dual and conference championship meets? Is the futility, conversely, among other schools a contagion leading to greater indifference to participation?
I’m saying it, but, similar to muskrats, if you hear or see one, there are at least ten in the hole by your pond, so this leads me to believe the affected communities must be thinking of it.
NLC girls’ basketball does not have as wide a gap among its two or three top teams, but the top three schools (Warsaw, Northridge, Goshen [recently]), even when they were off to a slow start, finished off most of their opponents by at least double-digit margins.
Witnessing a close-scoring game when you have a successful girls’ basketball program is a rarity. The weak are… very weak, and if you block out the teams with your fingers while you peruse the scores, girls’ basketball – and boys’ too for that matter – could use a mercy rule.
The mercy rule came in handy this week in the Warsaw-hosted girls’ soccer sectional as Homestead (10-1 win over Fort Wayne South Side in 60 minutes), and Warsaw (9-0 win over Fort Wayne [Anthony] Wayne in 63 minutes) vanquished their postseason foes and closed business early thanks to the IHSAA soccer mercy rule.
The IHSAA, pardon the topic shift, isn’t coddling the athletes with a mercy rule. There is a cost/injury avoidance effectively addressed, too.
The disparity in football is exacerbated when teams are riddled with injuries I’ll give you one C, conditioning, as the driver of that problem. Setting aside head and knee injuries, I believe injury-riddled programs’ whose athletes suffer other maladies are a symptom requiring a hard look at off-season conditioning.
Four of the last five Tiger football victories are testimony to that. Warsaw won those games in the off-season. There is a contagion of participation in Tiger football, too. Warsaw fielded two freshman rosters exceeding 50 athletes for two consecutive seasons.
It’s going to take more than a brutally honest columnist to identify, and to treat the symptoms.
I scratched the surface last week discussing problematic issues in sub-varsity gridiron game scheduling, and the Northern Lakes Conference’s recent growing disparity at the varsity football level.
It was a broad net the caller and I cast in a 50-minute dialogue, and I had to restrain my immediate compulsion and excitement to address it. It was time to end my lunch hour.
Instead, I’ll ask the rhetorical question, “What’s wrong with (selected) NLC sports?” A brutally honest, middle-aged columnist is not capable of giving you the answers. In fact, given my tone, you might even be muttering, “…and sanctimonious” under your breath while you read.
This challenge literally takes a village.
I’ll set some parameters for you to examine. May I suggest, to keep people running off the rails with excuses, we break it down factually among these four Cs only: Conditioning, Commitment, Community, Consistency.
I intentionally omitted coaching because it’s a fifth “C” people will, unfairly in most cases, use as a cop out to avoid introspection, and to avoid being honesty brokers among themselves.
The four Cs I listed for you put the onus on the athletes, families, and collective athletic communities to be painfully honest about a school district’s community, its culture, and its behaviors in relation to high- and under-performing athletic programs.
In the meantime, I’ll give you my opinions on the matter among selected sports. If you already appreciate my honesty, I hope you continue to appreciate it when it hits closer to home.
The most disparate sports in the NLC are girls’ track and field (Warsaw, Northridge, and all others far behind), girls’ basketball (Warsaw, Northridge, Goshen [recently], and all others behind), girls’ soccer (Warsaw, Northridge, Goshen, and five distant followers), and football. The latter has three bottom teams far behind the top four with limited signs of near-term improvement. A fourth (Northridge) tends to hit a downward spiral once a few key players incur injuries.
It will behoove you to look on the NLC website to see the point distribution among the boys’ and girls’ all sports trophy points: again, Northridge, and Warsaw stand out among the rest of the schools who jockey for the third through eighth spots among several sports. You’ll see it in the points earned.
Rivalries aren’t rivalries when the most recent win by one of the two schools spans more than a decade, or even when there might be one win by one of the combatants in the last decade.
Let’s look at girls’ track and field. Warsaw’s conference titles stretch back to the 2000’s. The Warsaw Tigers’ toughest dual meet opponents in this sport are… other Warsaw Tigers racing in the varsity heats.
When you watch the conference meet each mid-May at the Tiger Athletic Complex you see Warsaw’s overwhelmingly greater participation levels begetting depth and begetting multi-decade *yawn* dominance. Furthermore, Northridge has begun to distance itself from the third-place finisher by dozens of points.
What symptoms can we detect from such lopsided dual meet and invitational scores? Exhaustion of two teams (the Tigers, Northridge) overwhelmingly leading the pack in dual and conference championship meets? Is the futility, conversely, among other schools a contagion leading to greater indifference to participation?
I’m saying it, but, similar to muskrats, if you hear or see one, there are at least ten in the hole by your pond, so this leads me to believe the affected communities must be thinking of it.
NLC girls’ basketball does not have as wide a gap among its two or three top teams, but the top three schools (Warsaw, Northridge, Goshen [recently]), even when they were off to a slow start, finished off most of their opponents by at least double-digit margins.
Witnessing a close-scoring game when you have a successful girls’ basketball program is a rarity. The weak are… very weak, and if you block out the teams with your fingers while you peruse the scores, girls’ basketball – and boys’ too for that matter – could use a mercy rule.
The mercy rule came in handy this week in the Warsaw-hosted girls’ soccer sectional as Homestead (10-1 win over Fort Wayne South Side in 60 minutes), and Warsaw (9-0 win over Fort Wayne [Anthony] Wayne in 63 minutes) vanquished their postseason foes and closed business early thanks to the IHSAA soccer mercy rule.
The IHSAA, pardon the topic shift, isn’t coddling the athletes with a mercy rule. There is a cost/injury avoidance effectively addressed, too.
The disparity in football is exacerbated when teams are riddled with injuries I’ll give you one C, conditioning, as the driver of that problem. Setting aside head and knee injuries, I believe injury-riddled programs’ whose athletes suffer other maladies are a symptom requiring a hard look at off-season conditioning.
Four of the last five Tiger football victories are testimony to that. Warsaw won those games in the off-season. There is a contagion of participation in Tiger football, too. Warsaw fielded two freshman rosters exceeding 50 athletes for two consecutive seasons.
It’s going to take more than a brutally honest columnist to identify, and to treat the symptoms.
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