derek782

Boyd is a very experienced team. Their four best players are all seniors and I think they have a total of 6 or 7 seniors on the team. They have won at Tyner and at home against McMinn Central and had a 3rd quarter lead at Brainerd slip away. There is still a ton of ball to be played. Boyd still has to play every district team one more time with the exception of Seqoyah (who they swept). So a lot can happen but to answer your question I think Boyd is for real. Also an interesting article about the Buccaneer seniors in today's Times Free Press.... http://tfponline.com/absolutenm/templates/...&zoneid=133

Current records according to the CoachT standings: 1 Brainerd 8-1 2 Boyd Buchanan 8-2 3 Tyner Academy 8-2 4 McMinn Central 5-4 5 Tellico Plains 4-6 6 Meigs Co. 3-5 7 Polk Co. 3-7 8 Sweetwater 3-7 9 Sequoyah 1-9 There are lots of games to be played but how do you think this district will shake out? This Friday Tyner plays Brainerd which is a huge game for the battle for the top seed. I hear McMinn is definitely playing better and Tellico and Polk are both tough places to play (Tellico beat Boyd at home and Polk beat Brainerd at home). What do you think about the remainder of the season in this district?

Success isn't a basis for the split. If so you guys should want Trousdale Co, Alcoa, Knox Fulton, Maryville, and Riverdale all out of competition as well. As for the list of athletes...impressive research G-ville. These are all very recent too. Unfortunately for your argument I know that at least 10 of these folks attended the school in elementary. The number is probably higher than that but I have a few years on these people and don't know all of them personally. So are you saying that we lure this talent in when they are 5 or 6 years old???? If the folks at Boyd have that good of an eye for talent they need to get out of education and go be scouts in the NFL because I promise you they would make a lot more money.

How do lesser facilites and lower paid coaches not directly effect perfromance on the field? Furthermore their have been lots of athletes through the years at Boyd who have only played one sport or not participated at all and sports have suffered because of it. When Boyd was good at basketball they were terrible in football and when football got good the basketball team has been pretty average since. Baseball has always been a rollercoaster, good some years, terrible others. I'm sure thats how it is at the publics of similiar size. Unless the best athletes participate in every sport other sports will suffer. Back to my original point, this makes small privates similar to publics because they have a lot of hurdles to jump. BA and McCallie don't have to deal with these issues b/c they have kids there to participate in specific sports year in and year out.

I would love to hear some evidence on your theory that small privates want "to be like BA, Ensworth, and MBA". I know at the small private I went to the administration did lots of things to make sure the school was different from the big privates in the mission and goals of the school. I think that is an unfair and uninformed statement to make.

Having gone to Boyd I'll use them as my example: Not being able to give financial aid, having average facilities, needing lots of volunteer parents to make any sports program go, having one gym for Jv girls, boys and varsity girls and boys, not having lights on a baseball field, needing the best athletes in the school to play every single sport so that any one sport can be competitive, and having coaches that are paid less than public coaches makes us a whole lot more like Sequatchie than we are McCallie. In fact it could be argued that Sequatchie has several advantages over Boyd. Much better facilities (a great gym I played in a couple of times back in the day), and higher paid coaches are a couple that come to mind.

What group is that? BA isn't a member of any group that the small privates are a part of. He hasn't been the face or voice for the 1A and 2A privates. I think a lot of the problem with this whole debate is that "anti-privates" think that all privates are like BA, McCallie, Baylor, MBA, etc, etc. DCA, CPA, Boyd, JCS and other small privates were not founded for the same reasons as the bigger ones, they have different missions and agendas and frankly they are two totally different animals. All schools everywhere have advantages and disadvantages whether public or private. The small privates have a whole lot more in common with their public rivals than they do the big DII schools.

So what? His image of a private school is Brentwood Academy who travel to McCallie,Baylor, and MBA every year. Of course he thinks that some privates have advantages because in his mind these schools represent what a private school is. But if you think a guy from Brentwood Academy really knows anything about Boyd Buchanan or JCS or DCA or Ezell-Harding you're crazy. Trust me Boyd, for example, has a lot more in common with a public shcool of similiar size than they do Brentwood Academy. Thats no knock on Boyd but lets compare apples to apples here and Coach Flatt has not been around many of the "apples" that a split would really effect.

Portland has struggled some of late but they are very young (only one senior contributor). They have some very good young talent including a great sophomore class. Arguably their best player is a sophomore who was hurt all last year from football and got minimal varsity tick. The head coach is only in his second season and the rest of the coaching staff is new this year. I say give Portland time and they will be back on the top of that district. What does White House have besides an overweight post player?

Boyd beat McMinn Tuesday night 54 to 52. The win moved the Bucs to 4 and 1 in the district. BBS has a huge match-up Friday night against the Brainerd Panthers at Brainerd. The Bucs are playing well having won their last 5 games including an impressive win against Tyner. I don't know any stats from the McMinn game yet but congrats to the Buccaneers!

I see your point and it is well taken. My response is this: sending a kid the message that we want them to pray in school and sending a kid the message that you don't have to compete against people who may or may not have advantages over you are two totally different messages. The first one is a message that kids will thank their parents for years later. The second one is a lesson that no parent would teach their kid in any other realm of life so why in high school sports?

Indian, I agree that even after a split that nothing would be easy. Their are plenty of competitive public schools in all sports in all classifications throughout the state. Secondly I'm not saying that publics should play privates so they can lose on the field and gain character (ie Red Boiling Springs vs. Riverdale). I'm saying the non financial aid giving privates aren't different enough from the publics to warrant a split. Therefore, by telling kids in public schools that the guys at Boyd or DCA or JCS or wherever have some huge advantage over them then the guys at the smaller public schools are destined to fail. They are kids and are going to believe, for the most part, what their parents tell them. I always enjoy your posts and agree with much of what you say outside the public/private forum. I have to disagree, however, that real world examples don't apply to this situation. High school sports is about preparing kids for the real world. Bottom line. Thats hard for guys like us who love our teams enough to get on here and rant and rave about high school athletics as grown men. I fall into that category, I admit. I want my school to win every game. But lets step back and look objectively, if the kids who participate aren't better suited for life as an adult after their participation then we have failed. And I don't think that telling one group of kids that another group has advantages over them and therefore should be sent away so as to not have to deal with them is helping anybody.

Isn't that what all parents think or say when they send their kids off to school? I don't think that sentiment is strictly for public schools. When parents send their kid to school they send them off and say if you don't get an education your chances of succeeding are pretty small. Not sure how that thought applies to a public/private split.

I know very little about either school I used in this specific example. I'm not a middle TN native. My point was to use a small private and a large public. Sorry for any confusion.

The logical conclusion of my philosophy is to play the teams on your schedule and do so without complaining about advantages the opponent may or may not have. In response to your question: How would a school eliminate competition (that they never had in the first place) by moving up in classification? For example, how is Nashville Christian (single A private) eliminating competition by not moving into Antioch's region (5A public)? The two schools have never met and likely never will on a football field. However, if they did I doubt Nashville Christian players and fans would demand that Antioch be removed from the schedule based on the advantages they may have because of a dramtically larger enrollment. And furthermore, your statement implies that all competition statewide is "watered down" and "weak" unless it is in the largest classification. Of course that is ridiculous. Your looking for flaws in my argument and thats fine but you can't argue with teaching kids to focus on bettering themselves instead of worrying about the other guy. Public schoolers have no choice but to think they are at a disadvantage because they hear it and read it on here from their parents and members of their community constantly. To relate it to the business world.... it would be easy if Adidas executives could just tell Nike to leave the country, but its not real world and its not happening. Eliminating the competition doesn't work and isn't a respectable solution in any other walk of life, why should it be done in high school sports? This whole debate is all about wanting your kids or your community school to get more wins. When the small privates were getting stomped this talk was non-existent. The same supposed advantages were there back then; kids from all over could come to one school, the kids parents were willing to put their own dollars into sports facilities, private schools required students to participate in sports, and on and on and on.... but the fact is no one was talking about these supposed advantages until CPA, DCA, and Boyd-Buchanan dominated single A football for about a decade. If small public schools had been winning none of this split talk would be going on. Which brings me to my original point, proponents of the split only want it to allow their kid to win a few more games a season instead of thinking about the lesson it teaches.