FB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[79jaybird]

Greg makes some great points and is right on with the disparities between the inner city and suburban IL high schools.  There is a huge difference in many factors between the likes of New Trier, Loyola, Mt. Carmel, Glenbard schools, MSL schools, etc.  than the likes of Taft, Simeon, Northridge Prep, etc.
There are great athletes that come out of the inner city schools- no doubt.  But the numbers are greater for the suburban chicago schools.  Here are some of the major suburban conferences that produce great athletes that usually go on to play college.
Mid Suburban League MSL
DuPage Valley   DVC
Central Suburban Leage CSL
West Suburban Silver/Gold   WSG  WSS
There are some big time football schools in these respective conferences that have produced great athletes that have played DIII and higher.

[usee]

with regard to building a winning program from the abyss I think Wheaton has a track record with that. THe #1 thing that helped wheaton go from worst to first (or 2nd worst to 1st) is staff. the facilities were certainly part of the rebuilding but not the #1 factor. the #1 thing the administration did was make a committment to JR Bishop and he made a similar committment. THat led to a trust between the two and 3 years later brought Mike Swider to Wheaton. With only 2 full time coaches wheaton went from a bottom half CCIW team to a top half. it was in about 1993 that they added a 3rd full time coaching position and in 1996 they won their first conference championship. by 2000 they had 4 full time committed coaches and we all know what their record has been since then. If you want to recruit you need committed full time staff. I don't know what NPU's reasons are but their coaching turnover is the #1 reason they don't win in my opinion. committ to building and keeping a winning staff and you will win in the CCIW.

[matblake]

That's an excellent point about the full time coaching usee.  That kind of commitment, as you said, comes from both the administration and the coach.  At the same time, having success also builds some success, I don't think that Wheaton would have been able to continue to add full time staff if there hadn't been some measure of success. 

[NCC_alum62]

Yikes Greg,

You write quite a bit there. 

My point wasn't that the CPS was back to the point from decades ago when the prep bowl was the game everyone aspired to get to.  I am stating that coaches are STARTING to come back to the city and the disparity in terms of getting teams past the first round of the state play-offs is starting to become slightly more of a parity.

2000- Team in semifinals
2001- Team in Quarterfinals
2002- Three teams to 2nd round
2003- Team in Quarterfinals
2004- Two teams to quarterfinals, One team to Semifinals
2005- Team in semifinals
2006- Team in Quaterfinals

It should be noted of course that IL made the switch from 6 to 8 classes in 2001 and that in 2000 Hubbard made the semifinals and got beat by state champ Mt. Caramel.  After 2000 more CPS teams became eligible to make the state play-offs (and more teams lost because they were woefully inadequate compared to their oppenents)  And before anyone posts the fact that many more suburban teams won games than city I allready know I'm simply putting the information out there that CPS schools have not been all first round defeats.

These numbers indicate only CPS teams, however there were many more Chicago Catholic teams that advanced into the quarters and semis as well as some champions (Mt. Caramel, St. Rita, St. Patrick, Gordon Tech, and others)

I'm not saying we're there, but the desparity has so many more factors than people want to believe. I'm agreeing with you on several points. Wealth, availability of pop warner, coaching, equipment, bodies all influence how these teams do.  I'm not trying to paint a rosier picture than reality, I am trying to say its not the all consuming defeat that I got when I read your previous post.  I think we agree on alot of points, I just took the fact that you think football in the city is dead as completly untrue.  I think it is alive and well with many CPS and Catholic League kids getting D-I, D-IAA, and D-II offers.

[Mugsy]

I'm trying to be sensitive to the posting rules, but it is the off season for football and this will be my last post regarding the topic.  Yes it is about baseball, we there was reasonable discussion about it and it gets more to the topic of sportsmanship than anything.

An interesting article on the ESPN website regarding the 57-1 thrashing Bridgewater State put on Newbury College.  It has a positive spin...

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=darcy/070509

[Pat Coleman]

You might want to post on the CCIW baseball board too.

[lakeshore]

Well put Greg...Nice article on Brandon Watts on the NPU website....he is playing with mahy former CCIW guys on that team.

http://www.northpark.edu/home/index.cfm?northpark=RNews.RNews_Story&ID=2028

[Mugsy]

You might want to post on the CCIW baseball board too.

Will do.

[79jaybird]

Usee is right that coaching and committment(s) are imperative for a winning ballclub.  Wheaton a dynasty from 1953-1959 when Harve Chrouser devoted oodles of time to help the Thunder stay at the top.  That was the first dynasty.  Carthage's Dynasty in 1969-1973 was all Art Keller and his staff.  The Augie Dynasty 1981-1988 was Bob Reade and the Wing-T juggernaut.  My point here is that I agree with Usee that coaching and full time committed staff, as well as the PLAYERS have to be committed to win.
Looking at North Park,  I don't think Robin Cooper was a good fit for NPU for a few reasons.  The greatest being that it just didn't appear that he was willing to "bottle feed" the program that needed a point of origin.
Scott Pethtel is and has been bottle feeding the program.  As we have discussed, his regime has helped with the Helwig Center, plans for a trip to Sweden, getting increased roster numbers, etc.  I think Pethtel is the best thing that North Park has had since Coach Rucks.

[robberki]

The issue addressed 4-5 years ago was Holmgren Athletic Complex, the issue addressed this year is Helwig.

[CardinalAlum]

NCCAlum62,

I have to disagree with you my friend.  The Public league is as bad as I have seen it in football.  Other than Hubbard, which has become the school good city football players attend, and Morgan Park, which is the best coached city team I have seen, the rest of the public league is terrible.  Mt. Carmel and others are scooping up the best kids in the city and winning with them.  Don't tell me about Lane Tech, which goes undefeated every year and then gets their butts kicked in the playoffs by a middle of the road suburban school.  Even Hubbard, which has great athletes every year, will never win a state title because they are poorly coached.   

[Gregory Sager]

There's one player whom NPU beat out Carthage to get, another whom they beat out Illinois Wesleyan to get, and a third whom NPU beat out Millikin to get. Who knows whether these guys will pan out or not ... and who knows just how hotly those other CCIW schools pursued those guys. But the point is that North Park is now starting to actually beat out other CCIW schools for recruits here and there, and that almost never happened in the past. The Vikings were always left with players whom their CCIW peers (and frequently even some IBFC schools) didn't bother to pursue, and it showed on the scoreboard.

That is very interesting.  Any idea if any of these kids have ties to North Park?  If they don't, it is certainly a trend in the right direction. 

I don't know for certain, but I strongly doubt that the kids for whom NPU beat out the other CCIW schools have ties to North Park.

[Gregory Sager]

Greg makes some great points and is right on with the disparities between the inner city and suburban IL high schools.  There is a huge difference in many factors between the likes of New Trier, Loyola, Mt. Carmel, Glenbard schools, MSL schools, etc.  than the likes of Taft, Simeon, Northridge Prep, etc.

Northridge Prep is a private school located in Niles near Golf Mill. You're probably thinking of Northside Prep, the CPS's high-powered new academic juggernaut located four blocks north of the NPU campus. However, Northside Prep doesn't have a football team.

Yikes Greg,

You write quite a bit there. 

No problem. Pat pays for the bandwidth, not me.

These numbers indicate only CPS teams, however there were many more Chicago Catholic teams that advanced into the quarters and semis as well as some champions (Mt. Caramel, St. Rita, St. Patrick, Gordon Tech, and others)

The CCL is definitely in much better shape than the CPL when it comes to football. We've already discussed Mt. Carmel, and the other Catholic schools you've mentioned all have managed to hold on to some degree in terms of maintaining their great gridiron traditions. But keep in mind that the CCL operates on a different plane than does the CPL; Catholic schools cater to parents from higher income levels (relatively speaking) that can afford to send their kids there, and who can in addition afford to supplement the budget of the school football team if their kid is a part of the team. In an American city of three million people, there has to be good high school football players, and most of the ones who come from a home that has any resources at all are products of the CCL. But even the CCL is not as strong as it once was. Its decline has not been as drastic as has been the decline of the CPL, but it has definitely declined over the past thirty or forty years.

I think we agree on alot of points, I just took the fact that you think football in the city is dead as completly untrue. 

I didn't say it was dead. I said it was dying. There's a significant difference between the two.

I don't know what NPU's reasons are but their coaching turnover is the #1 reason they don't win in my opinion. committ to building and keeping a winning staff and you will win in the CCIW.

The parallel between Wheaton's rise from the ashes and what NPU needs to do to duplicate that achievement is a limited one. Wheaton has always had the resources available to excel in any sport it pleases within the CCIW (i.e., contend, or at least finish in the top half of the league, on a regular basis) to a certain degree, if not to the degree it had in the late 1950s when it so dominated the rest of the league in the major sports that it basically turned competition into a travesty and the school was summarily shown the door by the other members. What it didn't have for the first fifteen years or so after returning to the CCIW at the end of the '60s was the will to match those resources. Once it did, Wheaton began to establish some hegemony in sports such as football and basketball in which it had previously been mediocre or worse. Wheaton's a good example of coaching making the difference on the scoreboard (Bishop and Swider in football, Bill Harris and Beth Baker in basketball) -- but the administration made the difference in the coaching by seeking out the best coaches available, paying them what they're worth, and giving them the extra staff and the budgetary resources to recruit properly (which for Wheaton means a big commitment to a travel budget for the coaches, since the school recruits nationally) rather than settle for coaches who would make do with whomever decided to attend the school without being specifically recruited for their respective sports.

NPU is different, in that even if the will had always been present within the administration to upgrade athletics -- and the will was definitely there during David Horner's presidency, since he's a former athlete himself and he really wanted to see NPU excel in athletics -- the resources weren't. Yes, the head coaching position in football has been a carousel, but the dissatisfaction between coach and administation has gone both ways. The administration has been unhappy with the win-loss records of the football program and (even more so) with the program's poor retention rates, but the coaches have been unhappy with everything from salary to staffing budget to (especially) facility infrastructure. If you can't provide good prospective coaches with what they feel they need to turn a program around, you'll never be able to hire them in the first place -- and the guys that you do hire will be the guys less likely to be able to make a dent in NPU's lamentable losing ways.

So much of this conversation is a variation of "what came first, the chicken or the egg?", so there's good arguments to be made in either direction. But I think that the overarching metanarrative surrounding NPU's forty years of gridiron futility lies in institutional and environmental limitations, not coaching. Coaching's just a symptom, not the cause.

As Rob said, the facility infrastructure problem has largely been eliminated. Holmgren Athletic Complex is now a solid and attractive football venue. Helwig Recreational Center is a first-rate training, practice, and weightroom facility. And I'm growing more and more convinced that North Park's found the right man to run the program as well. I think 79jaybird used a good metaphor when he spoke of Scott Pethtel "bottle-feeding" the program. He's doing a good job of not only recruiting and assembling a solid staff, he's really working hard at changing the mindset within the program. I agree with 79jaybird -- Scott Pethtel's got as good a shot at turning NPU's football fortunes around as anyone since Tim Rucks, and his chances may even be better than Tim's were.

[NCC_alum62]

NCCAlum62,

I have to disagree with you my friend.  The Public league is as bad as I have seen it in football.  Other than Hubbard, which has become the school good city football players attend, and Morgan Park, which is the best coached city team I have seen, the rest of the public league is terrible.  Mt. Carmel and others are scooping up the best kids in the city and winning with them.  Don't tell me about Lane Tech, which goes undefeated every year and then gets their butts kicked in the playoffs by a middle of the road suburban school.  Even Hubbard, which has great athletes every year, will never win a state title because they are poorly coached.   

It is bad...NO QUESTION it is not at the same level as suburban and even some of the rural teams...all I'm saying is that its gotten a BIT better the last few years than it was in the mid 90's through 2000.  It's comming back, and while its not at the level it once was "back in the day" (which was a wednesday), I think it will continue to improve.  Hubbard and Morgan Park are two very good teams, but also Simeon and Robeson are starting to make reguar appearences in the state play-offs.  I'm not heralding the return of the public league as a major force, I'm saying that its getting stronger and is allready more competitive.

Hubbards coach is terrible.  I cannot stand him as a person, very arrogant, curses out his players all the time...its truely an awful sight on the sidelines, but his RB just got signed by ND.

If you look at the top 30 recruits out of IL a good portion came from the CPS.

[79jaybird]

Greg thank you for the compliments... I was thinking "bottle feeding" because a young program (infant) needs nurturing to help the program/infant become a self sufficient adult/winning club.  Eventually once, North Park starts winning more and more games, they won't need the bottle and will not rely as heavily on Coach Pethtel- more themselves. 

My 2 cents on the public/CPS debate-- there was a time back in history where the CPS was dominant and the best football in the state of IL could be found in Chicago proper.  I would say since the 70's, with the expansion of the urbanites into the suburban areas-suburbanites  the overall strengths have moved away from the city.
There are some good football teams in Chicago, but they are not as plentiful and struggle in the IHSA playoffs against suburban public schools and Catholic League schools.