I will say that the pro-Central, anti-Central crowd is like the Obama vs. the right agenda. It’s all so precise, nobody will give an inch.
Nobody can sit in the middle. Say 99 good things about Central and one, “Eh” comment and you feel the wrath of what one CC guy once dubbed lovingly the, “Central mafia.”
On the other hand, there are coaches in the area that still call me, the “Central guy” because I went there back in the days of the Sugarhill Gang and Space Invaders. Yikes, am I old.
(CC folks, read the whole next paragraph, all of it, before you pick up the phone, please!!!)
Does Central recruit? Yes. It recruits students. Smart kids, athletes, drama candidates, musicians, skateboarders, bookworms, computer geniuses, any eighth graders it can find. It recruits everyone. Why, there’s that monthly tuition bill to deal with. You have to recruit.
As budgets tighten, look at Haverhill for one, the advantage Central and all the private high schools have could grow.
Affluent towns like Andover will always compete, I look at Fazio’s program and Mags’ baseball program as the two leaders. Andover, for the most part, has kept kids at home. Why, the school system has money, has done a great job with programs and facilities and they keep the environment positive.
Same with NA, although it just has a lower enrollment, so it really will never play up to D1 levels consistently. Still at its class, NA should be good, new school, new facilities, solid learning infrastructure.
Haverhill, and to a lesser extent, Methuen, for two towns, lead the more blue-collar towns that really could tumble, even further.
Does any kid in Haverhill really aspire to wear Brown-and-Gold?
“Yay, I can pay big money ($350 a sport I believe) to play on decrepit, horrendously kept fields, and go to school in an ugly, outdated high school.”
Sorry.
Places like Haverhill and again, to a lesser extent, Methuen, have used the excuses instead of fighting to be better against Central.
Paul Neal gets handed a raw deal, often at Lawrence.
The Boys Club does its best to direct top student athletes away from LHS, either to prep schools or Central Catholic and even more recently to school-choice towns like Georgetown. It’s a fact. The LBC is doing its best for the kids and it’s to be commended, but it hurts LHS an awful lot.
Paul stopped complaining a long time ago. He takes the kids who he has, who look like they want to be part of his program and fights for them 24/7.
You don’t think a Jonathan Cruz, Adrian Gonzalez or Dan O’Shea, all Lawrence kids, might have tilted the scales against CC if they went to LHS? Paul just puts his head down and fights, for his kids.
Do we get that, not just in hoop but in all sports, in Haverhill and Methuen?
Right now, Pat Graham is just beginning to fight huge Central ties to Methuen Pop Warner. But he needs the whole community to fight with him.
Same thing in Haverhill, where Mike Trovato is finding plenty of walls in his road to build youth programs.
Other than a handful of new travel teams, Haverhill doesn’t have a city-run hoop program. It’s a joke but the city powers don’t care.
The anti-Central clan can stop whining now and do something about evening that playing field.
I’ve never bought the “drawing from all these towns” argument.
1,000 kids from Methuen should be the same as 1,000 kids from methuen, salem, Haverhill, lawrence, NA, Andover, Windham, Pelham, etc.
Do you ever hear E.J. Perry whine about not having Carson? The guy just won back-to-back state titles and is favored for a third.
Do you ever hear Todd Kress about Billy Marsden or my man Ryan Wholey who graduated from BG a couple years ago?
Nope, Pelham’s got a state title, three finals appearances and a Lowell Christmas tourney title, beating SJP and where he beat the big boys.
I don’t hear Barry Chooljian and the Timberlane wrestling program crying because he lost a potential state champ in Shain Jowett to Central.
He just goes out, schedules the Raiders, and puts them on their backs. It’s the best recruiting tool any athletic program can have.
But it takes people willing to fight, not whine.
I’m going to point to Methuen for my final point and step onto the ice for a minute. Methuen has one of the deepest, well-entrenched youth hockey systems on the planet. i skated in it when I was 8. It’s huge.
The school has its own on-campus rink. There is no reason, none, that Methuen shouldn’t be like Chelmsford and Billerica and hockey. You can lose players to prep schools and Central like everyone else does. Methuen should be Reading.
Instead, it’s a program that has fallen into disarray in the last decade or more.
The reason for that is someone stopped caring, be it the slew of coaches that have run through there or whoever. Somewhere along the way, somebody stopped trying, really trying.
You have your own rink and a feeder system.
If I was someone in Haverhill, Methuen, Salem or wherever, who actually cared about the high school student-athletes, I’d be calling Tewksbury, a modest little town that somehow keeps the bulk of its talent (Other than all those talented Kobelski brothers) home.
The athletes play three sports, they go on to college, and yes, they compete with the big boys, maybe not in hoop but check out baseball and football, track, check out the girls sports, year in and year out Tewksbury,the smallest school in the MVC.
If I cared, and wasn’t just about taking the loud mouth route, I’d look at how Tewksbury succeeds, how they treat the kids in junior high, how they build community feeling, and what the educators are doing there.
I’d stop complaining. While it makes for lively blog talk, it does no good.
That’s my last, let’s get into the conference season.
