Thoughts on Class 3A thru 1A for the 2018 season?
- Thread starter EdgyTim
- Start date
sterling newman is poised to have another strong season. luke olson and chase graham are two names to remember.
McNamara's enrollment for this year is 570+...last year they would have been in 4A with their 556.5, and they are most likely 4A this fall...
Conversely, Herscher's enrollment has dropped to 527, which should safely put them in 3A. They lost a lot, but also have moved to the I-8 small...crossover games are Plano and Manteno, and non-conference are 2A Clifton Central and 2A Momence (who I'll talk about shortly). So Central, RC, Plano are likely wins...Peotone loses more talent than Herscher, so lets favor the Tigers...Lisle should be a good game...Manteno should be a good game...Wilmington is probably favored...Coal City is probably favored...A loaded Momence might be favored...They should make the playoffs, but not anywhere near as good as last year...
Wilmington is the I-8 small favorite....reload the lines, returning an all-state wing and QB...Opening at Manteno and hosting Coal City is a rough start, but that's normal for the Cats...Quarters or better...
Momence is poised for a huge season in 2A...Jason Bargy, 4 year starter, has committed to Minnesota as a DE, and they are moving him from RB to TE supposedly...Mazur, the QB, returns for year 3 as the starter. If the defense improves at all, since they scored 40 and gave up more per game last year, they could go a long way...
3a is wide open. Wilmington and Byron come to mind. After finally seeing Farmington and Elmwood play Wilmington, I can say I wasn’t really that impressed. I don’t know if Wilmo will be as strong as before so maybe a central IL school will be able to knock them off.
I don’t know much about 1 or 2A. Not because I think we are above it being in 3A but just because there arnt many smaller teams around us geographically.
I don’t know much about 1 or 2A. Not because I think we are above it being in 3A but just because there arnt many smaller teams around us geographically.
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Wilmington’s kids are some of the toughest and most fundamentally sound football players in 3A, if not the best. The coach will have them ready to go come playoff time. I vote Wilmington 3a, next best Byron.
I m using this thread because it mentions 1a which is what my thought is about.
When talking about great prep football programs in this state, maybe we should consider schools such as Arcola and Lena-Winslow. There are others but i am not informed about 1a football so I m using these two schools to make a point.
My point is this: maybe those are the best programs in the state or have the best coaches.
I mean we are talking about schools that have let’s say 250 kids average and half are likely girls. That’s 125 total boys or say 31 boys in each class.
With those minuscule numbers you would think the odds are enormous that in any given year there are zero or just one or two real athletes who want to play football in the class.
I mean at Stevenson for example there are 4,000 students 2,000 boys so roughly 500 boys in each class. How many football stud-type athletes does a coach need to be competitive in football! I don’t know but let’s say 10. It’s got to be easier to get 10 out of 500 than 10 out of 31.
Now in any given year maybe the 1a power does not need 10 real athletes to go 8-1. But these 1a powers are 8-1 every year. Surely in some years the classes of boys is not conducive to winning football. Yet they continue to win. That to me speaks volumes about the high quality of coaching at these 1a schools.
These same teams show up in the playoff bracket in mid-November seemingly most years and there is no way they can have classes with top-tier athletes every year.
And while thinking about the importance of coaching, longtime Stevenson coach Bill Mitz has won 60 games in 10 years at Jacobs in Algonquin.
You can do the math. Jacobs plays in a league with Huntley Cary-Grove and Prairie Ridge so cleArly mitz is a difference-maker as a coach.
When talking about great prep football programs in this state, maybe we should consider schools such as Arcola and Lena-Winslow. There are others but i am not informed about 1a football so I m using these two schools to make a point.
My point is this: maybe those are the best programs in the state or have the best coaches.
I mean we are talking about schools that have let’s say 250 kids average and half are likely girls. That’s 125 total boys or say 31 boys in each class.
With those minuscule numbers you would think the odds are enormous that in any given year there are zero or just one or two real athletes who want to play football in the class.
I mean at Stevenson for example there are 4,000 students 2,000 boys so roughly 500 boys in each class. How many football stud-type athletes does a coach need to be competitive in football! I don’t know but let’s say 10. It’s got to be easier to get 10 out of 500 than 10 out of 31.
Now in any given year maybe the 1a power does not need 10 real athletes to go 8-1. But these 1a powers are 8-1 every year. Surely in some years the classes of boys is not conducive to winning football. Yet they continue to win. That to me speaks volumes about the high quality of coaching at these 1a schools.
These same teams show up in the playoff bracket in mid-November seemingly most years and there is no way they can have classes with top-tier athletes every year.
And while thinking about the importance of coaching, longtime Stevenson coach Bill Mitz has won 60 games in 10 years at Jacobs in Algonquin.
You can do the math. Jacobs plays in a league with Huntley Cary-Grove and Prairie Ridge so cleArly mitz is a difference-maker as a coach.
I honestly think Lena Winslow is the best team 3A and down.
I really appreciate the thought you put into that point. 1 A gets almost no attention by this board.
A young coworker of mine, Jason Keneway, is the head coach at Kirkland Hiawatha. He just completed the best season in school history. He is a fine young man and is building A program there. hopefully Hiawatha under his tutelage will become one of those programs that can compete for the title consistently.
Is Hiawatha sliding down to 8 man football next year or was that just a false rumor I heard...?
I graduated from Manteno long before the Panthers played football, and the MHS enrollment dropped under 250 my senior year. A couple of factors which applied to MHS then generally apply to the 1A football powers...
First, when you look at the 1A powers the athletic programs are not watered down. You don't have a bad football team, a bad soccer team, a bad cross country team and a bad golf team. Many of these schools only offer football as a fall sport, or football and golf. Many traditionally only offered 3 total boys sports: football, basketball, & track or baseball. The talent doesn't get spread out, it all goes to the main sports.
Second, the community is behind them. Ain't much else to do in a town with only 250 kids in the high school on Friday night but go watch the ballgame. It's relatively cheap entertainment for young families, whose elementary kids grow up wanting to play for the Bulldogs, or Panthers, or Eagles etc. Manteno without football, the big Friday night was going to watch McNamara or Herscher...Heck, my sister dated Momence's starting QB for a while...
Third, rarely will you see these 1A powers doing anything fancy. Power run dominates because your best athlete is usually the feature running back. Farm boys dealing with hogs & cows find pushing linemen around a lot more fun. A passing game requires a QB and someone who can catch the ball...I formation, single wing abound.
And you will often find stable coaching staffs. Sometimes its alumni going to college and coming back to teach, helping the family during the busy farm seasons. Lots of these small towns are relatively inexpensive to live in, many families taking over the old family homestead - or the neighbors homestead as farm sizes keep growing and growing.
So basically you build a system designed around one feature back per class and 2-3 linemen per class...and you run with it.
Great Post! Thank you! I now have a better understanding of the challenges of small school football. What a wonderful thing for the kids in a small town to have everyone come out for their HS football game. Working as a farmer is under appreciated by most Americans IMO. Farming is hard work and the work ethic of the farmers is instilled in their children. Kudos to small school HS football.
I agree and I've said it for years. Only takes a handful of good athletes to be good at a small school. To be great you need a great coach who can put the rest of the pieces together.
This kind of info and discussion is exactly why this forum works.
Only thing missing is someone suggesting small school A would be a state power if it’s top student-athletes weren’t recruited away by non-boundary school B.
ThAt’s a joke people.
Ugly suggestion. It can be true. But I will give an example of a school who lost potentially the best teams in school history in other sports because they did not play football.
Grant Park, in the northeast corner of Kankakee County, has an enrollment of about 179. In the early '80s, there was serious discussion of consolidating with Manteno, as Manteno shrunk under 250 and I believe GP got under 120. They only offer four sports: Golf, Soccer, Basketball, and Baseball - they also co-op wrestling with Beecher and have co-oped other sports in the past. They had a group in junior high around 87-88 that was wildly successful, I believe they went to state in baseball & basketball, and decent in track. But their success was driven by one incredibly talented young man who decided to go to McNamara to play football. No recruiting, since GP did not offer football...it was go to Mac or not play.
Going to McNamara was a boon to this young man, who ended up about 6'5" 240 lbs and got a football scholarship to Louisville as a tight end. He averaged like 18 ppg in basketball and went to state in multiple events in track. Grant Park without him suffered multiple 2 win basketball & baseball seasons - since he was the stud pitcher on their state junior high baseball teams and leading scorer, rebounder, and everything else on the hoops team. They might have been able to win the first hoops regional in school history with him. The 1A school that doesn't play football just can't replace that once in a lifetime stud who goes to the private school to play football.
And if you look at a McNamara roster from that era around 1990, you find some great football players who came from towns that didn't have football. A left tackle from Pembroke Township/Hopkins Park who would have gone to St. Anne - but got a scholarship to Michigan and played for the Cardinals. St. Anne didn't offer 2 of his sports - football & wrestling. They had 2 starters in the backfield from Manteno, which gutted the Panther basketball, baseball & track teams. But that was the penalty for not having football.
About 10% of my eighth grade class from Manteno went to McNamara - 8 or 9 kids out of a mid-70s class. Still about 10 go, but the 8th grade class is now about 175 kids, not 75. Offering football has seriously reduced the loss of athletes to the Irish...I don't get bothered by parents who send their kids there for a Catholic education, or because they are a Mac family where the parents went to Mac, grandparents went to Mac, great-grandparents went to St. Pats...In my era, if someone said they could get a better education at Mac, it would be hard to argue, but not anymore. It is part of the reason Mac's enrollment has nearly been cut in half...
A friend posted a picture of a rather large group of Bradley-Bourbonnais faculty that are Clifton Central alums on facebook today...9 of them supporting their alma mater in Central garb. Rob Zimbelman chose not to wear his midriff baring early-mid 80's jersey, though...although his wife certainly had the giggles posting an action shot of him in the midriff jersey and white knee-hi 3 stripe socks...
