sapientia et veritas wrote: Tue Oct 03, 2017 12:07 pm
The CBP is an adjusted enrollment. In football, "Tier 0" gets no adjustment, "Tier 1" gets an adjustment of 1, "Tier 2" gets an adjustment of 2. Private schools are assigned (or pick) a "school district" that represents their attendance zone. A kid who attended a feeder school in the same school system as the designated attendance zone does not count as an extra. A kid who attended a school that has always been a feeder school for the high school but is outside the attendance zone since the Catholic schools don't operate on a one high school per public high school system anymore counts as Tier 1. For some schools, it has little to no effect. For example, Portsmouth Notre Dame gets the vast majority of their kids from Notre Dame Elementary. Rarely, they might get a family from Wellston Sts Peter and Paul. Those kids would get an extra enrollment count of 1. Ironton St Joe kids would also. A kid who goes to PND from a public school counts as 2.
In the metro areas, in order to be "fair" the large city districts are split into imaginary districts that don't actually exist that are centered around a particular high school or schools. For Watterson, they might choose the Whetstone High School zone. It's geographically closest, and it includes two feeder schools - Immaculate Conception and Our Lady Of Peace. All the kids from St Agatha, St Andrew, St Brendan, St Brigid, St Mary Delaware, St Michael, and St Timothy would count as one extra. Public school kids would count as two extra.
Hartley's designated feeder schools are All Saints and St Catherine's. Maybe 35 of the total boys in the school came from there, but only 16 of the football players. The rest of the roster from feeder schools who count as an additional roster count were scattered across St Mary German Village, St Pius, Holy Spirit, and St Matthew. Hartley has partnered with Grace Christian as a feeder school that does school visits for 5-10 years now, but all those kids are Tier 2 per OHSAA.
There are demographic oddities with the Columbus schools.
St Charles draws from the entire city. They don't have any boundaries like the rest of the schools. They are a magnet school for rich and smart kids. They have a colossal endowment and give a ton of scholarships. They have a football CBP of 108 which is a complete joke. No one in their right mind goes there for football, except Bob Jacoby apparently. LOL. They do have serious talent in some other country club sports and usually have a good basketball team. They should be competing in D-VI for football.
Watterson area is mostly middle, upper middle, and upper class kids. They might have one or two voucher kids in any given year. Academically and athletically, they are competing with Upper Arlington, Hilliard, Dublin, and Worthington Schools. They aren't a sports destination school, but field a fine field hockey team. Girls teams are all great. Nearly all their kids come thru the feeder schools. I'm guessing 98% or so. That keeps their CBP number lower. Also, not having a JV team helps their number this year. They have a large endowment and give a bunch of scholarships - but they're all merit scholarships for nerds. Some small fraction of the smart nerds are also good at sports. They should be competing in D-IV for football.
Hartley and Ready are both located in economically depressed areas with middle class suburbs with good public schools on the edges full of people who worked hard to escape the areas where the schools are located. Neither school has any endowment to speak of, and neither draws kids away from the suburbs for sports.
Ready had a decent talent bump when Southwestern City Schools shut down all sports to extort their community for more tax money by that tide is drifting out as evidenced by the Devin Dukes transfer to Grove City. They have a decent number of legacy kids who tend to be athletic, hard-working, and scrappy, but there aren't enough of them to keep the doors open on their own. Ready runs on voucher kids, but most of them are system kids who've been getting vouchers thru grade school also. Take them away and the school closes. Many of these kids - legacy and voucher - count as one extra for the same reasons as Watterson - too many feeder schools located in too many public districts.
Hartley does an annual fundraiser to pay for some merit scholarships, and the winners are nerdly. Admittedly, our fraction of smart nerds who are also good at sports is higher or more male than Watterson's. Hartley has more scholarship money than Ready.
There are two Columbus Public alternative schools close to Hartley - Berwick Alternative and Columbus Prep Academy for Boys. The parents of the kids who attend these schools are more active and engaged and serious about education - basically the kinds of families that typically give the private schools an advantage over public schools who have to take the kids who are effectively checked out in multiple ways. These families have to participate in a lottery system to get their kids into a corresponding selective high school like Eastmoor Academy or Columbus Alternative. Hartley does get these kids, and many of them are eligible for vouchers. For the last 5 years or so, Hartley has had an admissions test to weed out the kids who aren't likely to make it academically, so there are less voucher kids there now than 10 years ago - probably 5-10 in each grade. Prior to the current coach, no one went to Hartley for football. Even now, the school doesn't pull football players away from the big D-1 suburban publics.
I'll give a few examples. Jaden Manley. Older and beefier brother was punt returner at Gahanna; Jaden would likely not have played at all. Two year starter at Hartley and caught a TD pass in state championship game. Zang kids. Great athletes and team / school leaders. Committed Catholics. They live in Pickerington North area. Would have been great wrestlers there. All about 30-40 pounds too light for football though. Tommy Casimir. All state lineman at Hartley for two years. Fast pulling guard. Best case scenario at Pickerington - backup linebacker. Godwin Igwebuike. He opted to go from St Pius to Pickerington since it was free and had D-1 visibility. Three of his St Pius teammates were multi-year starters at Fisher Catholic.
The idea that Hartley is the east side all star football team is a complete joke. Outsiders who believe that just don't know anything about the school. None of these schools pull football players away from the big D-1 suburban publics. Hartley and Ready are now competing in the divisions where they belong.
DeSales area is a mix of lower, middle and upper middle class kids. Their territory covers some rough areas of Columbus, so they always have voucher kids as well. They have a large endowment, and it's been rumored for decades that they have scholarships for sports even though the diocese frowns on that. People have said the same of Hartley after football success. The DeSales school website has the team name in it. They have a separate athletics website. The football team has its own website and radio show. They like sports. St Paul is one of their feeder schools, and it has three classes per grade. That drives down their CBP number. Some schools will game the CBP system by picking one as the official feeder schools as the semi-official football feeder school, but I don't Columbus schools have that luxury. I've heard talk from some who think that the DeSales number is too low. They just had a four-star defensive end become eligible last weekend who transferred in from Olentangy. That has happened on a routine basis for the last 40+ years, so a lot of prospective football recruits see them as the Columbus All Star Sports Academy. They have the lowest GPA requirement in the Diocese for sports participation. When my kids played against them, their athletics facilities were first class, but the school building was a dump. Their eighth grade visit for feeder school kids starts with a creepy sports cult pep rally. They are known throughout the city as having an "active alumni network." They should be playing D-1. In this conversation, they are the only school comparable to Hoban and SVSM.
All these schools have athletic advantages. I don't disagree with that. I just think that looking at the CBP adjustment in isolation is a contrived and artificial way of determining the degree of it. CBP is better than nothing at levelling the playing field, but it has some flaws.
