LaxPower Back-Up Stick

So who does MSJ hire for the head coaching position?

at the risk of being rude, does it matter?

Of course it does! MSJ Gaels are a very proud group!
They take their lumps from time to time, but it's a good group of kids on the West side.
Will be interesting to see who follows up Slaf and Berger...

I hear you. In my mind, but maybe I need to look a little more closely, is that they take a lot of lumps.

Phillip Bates named MSJ coach:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/s ... clnk&gl=us

I dunno. MSJ seems to be going with the default coach.

Yes. But the big names of Slaff and Berger didn't do a whole lot either. Severn showed some success with the in-house model. Having a guy that knows and connects with the kids is a good thing.
As I said above and it's not an excuse, but MSJ's model has historically been to compete against the best and educate young men that way, not "win lacrosse games at any cost."
But even still, I'm shocked they have been in the A for so long and have so little to show for it.
We shall see.

How is Gilman looking this year???

I think this is the year many Gilman fans expect some results. We've heard for the past couple year that they had some promising young kids. I would assume they are older now and ready to take the conference by storm?
We shall see!
Where are all the MIAA regulars from LaxPower?

Brandau making some noise as a freshman. Yale-USA Game

thatsmell wrote:I think this is the year many Gilman fans expect some results. We've heard for the past couple year that they had some promising young kids. I would assume they are older now and ready to take the conference by storm?
We shall see!
Where are all the MIAA regulars from LaxPower?

Joining in to get this thread in my feed.

I'd think Gilman will be "better" but I'm not sure whether that will translate to contention or not.
Certainly they have a bunch of seriously good players who have matured.

But, unfortunately, I think there may be a desert coming again behind them. I've heard of multiple youngsters switching from Gilman to other schools for $ or choosing them for that reason .
Some of that is puzzling, but what I'm hearing is that some other schools got quite aggressive while Gilman remained quite passive. Almost dogmatically so in the rebound from the Poggi era.

But I also have a hunch that the school may regain its footing athletically in due course, albeit with far more of teacher-coach and a serious student-athlete perspective. But they're working in a context, in part of their own making with the Poggi era, of hyper-aggressive recruiting of kids. With our lax HC's relative eschewing of such, I think it's going to take considerable luck to have enough studs mature at the same time to be able to beat the schools that are loading up heavy with recruits, at whatever cost.

I'm glad to see that the newest addition to the staff is one of my son's former Harvard teammates, Jake Scott, who will work with the offense. Jake's a 2-yr Penn-Callard teaching fellow in the upper school English department and is a very bright, positive young man; played his HS ball at Conestoga on their great teams; his dad Peter was a terrific player at Hopkins, sister plays at Hopkins now for Janine Tucker. He's already become involved in the club scene and I believe he will be a very good recruiter, attracting student-athlete oriented families. Hopefully he'll stick at Gilman following his fellowship. IMO, that's the sort of teacher-coach Gilman needs a lot more of and let's hope that's the game plan.

On the football scene, Gilman is going through an epically bad season. I had a nice chat earlier this week with the former AD/former HC and learned that just 35 boys came out for football this year. Just a couple of years ago there were 80 on the varsity sideline, plus a JV and Fresh Soph. So, severe talent depletion as pretty much all of Poggi's pipeline went away or has now graduated. Last year was the remnants of that pipeline, plus a couple of Gilman legacies who were first rate.

However, he told me that the young new HC is a terrific young man, great football mind, teaching history, and will surely build a respectable program in due course. I wouldn't be surprised if that had positive spillover effects to lacrosse and some other sports, given the target kids that should attract.

But it can't be understated that $ is how schools are wooing kids. Poggi was making up the difference or flat out paying 100% of a whole lot of tuitions and we're seeing the same sort of thing at some other schools in various sports of particular attention. BTW, I heard that Poggi also paid the tuition for some kids at rival programs, something not well known. Interesting.

But the $ battle is definitely for real right now, with 'merit scholarships' being used to woo athlete-families. That's ostensibly against the MIAA guidelines/rules, but, as we discussed on the old LP, the MIAA has been rendered pretty toothless.

Big games this week!

Any A teams participating in the fall NHSLS?

thatsmell wrote:Any A teams participating in the fall NHSLS?

An answer to my own question, starting Nov 17th:



No Spalding and no Severn teams.

MIAA A Results from NHSLS:

St. Mary's went 3-0
BL White went 3-0
McD went 3-0
St. Paul's went 3-0
CH went 2-1
Gilly went 2-1
Loyola went 2-1
John Carroll went 1-2
BL Maroon went 0-2-1
MSJ went 0-3

MDlaxfan76 wrote:

thatsmell wrote:I think this is the year many Gilman fans expect some results. We've heard for the past couple year that they had some promising young kids. I would assume they are older now and ready to take the conference by storm?
We shall see!
Where are all the MIAA regulars from LaxPower?

Joining in to get this thread in my feed.

I'd think Gilman will be "better" but I'm not sure whether that will translate to contention or not.
Certainly they have a bunch of seriously good players who have matured.

But, unfortunately, I think there may be a desert coming again behind them. I've heard of multiple youngsters switching from Gilman to other schools for $ or choosing them for that reason .
Some of that is puzzling, but what I'm hearing is that some other schools got quite aggressive while Gilman remained quite passive. Almost dogmatically so in the rebound from the Poggi era.

But I also have a hunch that the school may regain its footing athletically in due course, albeit with far more of teacher-coach and a serious student-athlete perspective. But they're working in a context, in part of their own making with the Poggi era, of hyper-aggressive recruiting of kids. With our lax HC's relative eschewing of such, I think it's going to take considerable luck to have enough studs mature at the same time to be able to beat the schools that are loading up heavy with recruits, at whatever cost.

I'm glad to see that the newest addition to the staff is one of my son's former Harvard teammates, Jake Scott, who will work with the offense. Jake's a 2-yr Penn-Callard teaching fellow in the upper school English department and is a very bright, positive young man; played his HS ball at Conestoga on their great teams; his dad Peter was a terrific player at Hopkins, sister plays at Hopkins now for Janine Tucker. He's already become involved in the club scene and I believe he will be a very good recruiter, attracting student-athlete oriented families. Hopefully he'll stick at Gilman following his fellowship. IMO, that's the sort of teacher-coach Gilman needs a lot more of and let's hope that's the game plan.

On the football scene, Gilman is going through an epically bad season. I had a nice chat earlier this week with the former AD/former HC and learned that just 35 boys came out for football this year. Just a couple of years ago there were 80 on the varsity sideline, plus a JV and Fresh Soph. So, severe talent depletion as pretty much all of Poggi's pipeline went away or has now graduated. Last year was the remnants of that pipeline, plus a couple of Gilman legacies who were first rate.

However, he told me that the young new HC is a terrific young man, great football mind, teaching history, and will surely build a respectable program in due course. I wouldn't be surprised if that had positive spillover effects to lacrosse and some other sports, given the target kids that should attract.

But it can't be understated that $ is how schools are wooing kids. Poggi was making up the difference or flat out paying 100% of a whole lot of tuitions and we're seeing the same sort of thing at some other schools in various sports of particular attention. BTW, I heard that Poggi also paid the tuition for some kids at rival programs, something not well known. Interesting.

But the $ battle is definitely for real right now, with 'merit scholarships' being used to woo athlete-families. That's ostensibly against the MIAA guidelines/rules, but, as we discussed on the old LP, the MIAA has been rendered pretty toothless.

Brooks Matthews stepping down as Gilman's Head Coach after 2019 season.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/hig ... story.html

From the article, it appears that Brooks understands that the landscape for recruiting and supporting athletes has become extremely competitive in the MIAA during this most recent decade and that he has not been willing or able to compete the same way or at the same pace. And doesn't really want to do so. His focus has always been on teaching the game, rather than those other aspects. He's been a true teacher/coach in the best sense. But these other aspects have not been his strong suit, and ultimately have cost the program kids who would likely have prospered at Gilman. The difference may be just a few kids per year, but the competitiveness of the league is such that those few kids make an enormous difference to the overall scoreboard success rate.

Having spoken with quite a few parents these past few years, my sense is that a change in Head Coach provides an opportunity to refresh the program and to rebuild forward momentum.

One thing that may be a bit heartening, at least to some of us, is that two of the best Gilman players of this senior class are going to Ivies next year. I don't think that's been the case since 2012 when my son and Harry McCarthy chose to do so, but up until the Matthews era it used to be typical of close to half the top recruited lax players out of Gilman. It's not that Ivies are the end all be all, it's just that there seemed to be a loss of emphasis on using lax to achieve a 'stretch academic opportunity' rather than just the best lax program.

I tend to blame the shift in emphasis on the 'Poggi effect' at Gilman as the ranking of the sports program achieved seemed to become the goal instead of whether it was a 'stretch' academically. Fortunately, with lacrosse there are lots of excellent schools in the top tier of the game, so its not as if top players were necessarily going to bad academic schools. But the emphasis on 'stretch' was lost. As I think that was part of Gilman's prior appeal to many Gilman-eligible prospects and parents, and had been differentiating relative to most peer institutions, losing that edge seems to have cost some recruits. Again, only takes a couple.

Speaking of Poggi, Soledad O'Brien ran a piece with Biff and the SFA program yesterday.

https://matteroffact.tv/this-football-t ... play-them/

Her program's length does not lend itself to in-depth reporting, but it's nevertheless a shame that the sensationalistic aspect of having been dropped by local schools is still being covered this way as somehow driven by race.

Poggi built, with his money, will, and strong staff, in remarkably short time, a national powerhouse football program. They did so primarily by recruiting many of the already identified top college prospects over multiple states, as well as from the Maryland region and then doing a good job of coaching them. The team is enormously big, fast, and strong, as well as highly talented, the equal or darn close to it of any program in the nation. It's especially good to hear that all participants, according to Soledad, went on to college last year.

That's cool, and we can easily wish them well in their national level football pursuits, but the whining about their former opponents dropping them from their schedules, and especially the attribution to racial dynamics, is immensely inappropriate. Biff has made clear, been quoted, that he'd intended to drop the MIAA next year anyway, but the MIAA moved before he expected, given that the disparity was so pronounced so much faster than perhaps Biff himself had expected.

Heck, Biff's alma mater and former program, Gilman, did not actually refuse to play SFA, only dropping them after SFA/Biff scheduled anther opponent on their scheduled date. And that was after losing to SFA twice the year before by whopping big margins, despite Gilman being the 2nd best team in 2017's MIAA. (and knowing they'd be at best middle of the pack the following year (just 37 total players in the upper school program). And yet the reporting made it sound as if they too had dropped SFA.

Interestingly, the O'Brien piece mentioned that in the 2nd to last game of the current season, 2018, a team actually arrived from Ohio to take on SFA, but half the team refused to get off the bus, and that school forfeited. Reason? Concern about being hurt. Again, SFA's team is huge and powerful, so it's not actually irrational. But pretty unusual to come all the way from Ohio only to decide not to play enroute.

(I think it is reasonable to expect that in 2019 and on, SFA will be able to schedule a national set of opponents that give them a good test. This year, the best any opponent (from Philly) could do was a 35-0 drubbing).

One thing that is disturbing from the reporting was that the MIAA did not provide a spokesperson to go on camera to explain its constituents' views. Nor did any of the schools.

Perhaps they are 'gun shy' having been so repeatedly abused in the press, and were concerned that only a snippet of what they would have to say would be unfairly used to make them look bad. Gilman's co-AD, Lori Bristow, had done a creditable job in earlier interviews, but nevertheless the reporting emphasized the racial accusations as if truly credible. I can certainly imagine not wanting to go on camera and just trusting the media to tell the full story. They did respond in writing, apparently, but not going on camera was made to sound as if they were afraid of answering questions.

But this whole thing was handled weakly by the MIAA, right from the get go.

As we've discussed before, IMO the various recruiting tactics, across sports, deserves an honest review and reappraisal, as they definitely do not conform to the stated goals and rules of the organization. But this would require the league to really look each other in the eye and decide exactly what the standards and policies should be going forward and then provide the mechanisms for enforcement that would be respected.

I'm not holding my breath.

Just for fun, someone should try to point out the positives of the MIAA. Who runs the best lax conference in the country? Are there better run leagues in Soccer, Baseball,B ball ect, Which lax conference actually adopts NCAA rules, which is great for future college players. and has a very good competitive league schedule and playoffs that actually make sense. Trust me that, not all leagues accomplish that. Over the years the conference has been able to add and lose teams and remain at the top of the competitive pyramid. I would argue that the self policing preference of the member schools has been, for the most part effective, while keeping controversy and animosity between member schools to a minimum. When Gilman football brought in the Poggi era, most other schools did not like it, but bit their tongue. and tried to compete the best they could. When McD picked up recruiting to compete with Gilman,especially for the 100 year game, the rest of the league did not complain loudly. I think when an individual school wants to crank up its presence in an individual sport or all sports, the league gives them some latitude. The core MIAA schools seem to revert back to their core principles if they get to far off course. These things run in cycles. St Frances was different on so many levels, as far as the schools' mission, and accepting 15+ transfers /year ect. that waiting for a return to "normalcy" was not an option. There were checks and balances at Gilman that do not exist at St Frances. I think the MIAA is as good a group as there is in the country. No it is not perfect, but I think the longevity of the league and the success of their programs across a wide spectrum of sport is, and has been, very impressive. Believe me when I say "spend a few years dealing with public school boards and committees and you will have a much higher opinion of what the MIAA accomplishes." I know they should be much more effective because they do not have all the constraints that public school league's have: But they are even better on the whole than the private school leagues.

Many fair points and for the most part I agree.

However, I think that periodic reassessment of how schools are ‘competing’ would be healthy. Indeed it has been done before.

I do think that the stated goals and rules of any voluntary organization are important. If they need to be changed, so be it, but do so conscientiously, and not unilaterally in some kind of whataboutism arms race.

From what I understand, several schools are well beyond the agreed upon rules, making critique of SFA awkward.

MDlaxfan76 wrote:Many fair points and for the most part I agree.

However, I think that periodic reassessment of how schools are ‘competing’ would be healthy. Indeed it has been done before.

I do think that the stated goals and rules of any voluntary organization are important. If they need to be changed, so be it, but do so conscientiously, and not unilaterally in some kind of whataboutism arms race.

From what I understand, several schools are well beyond the agreed upon rules, making critique of SFA awkward.

Almost all of the A Conference schools that wanted national recognition in any sport got a little sketchy. The exception might be lacrosse, where Beltway bragging rights are nearly more important than any "national championship".

Can anyone challenge the Cardinals? Will Anne Arundel County make any noise?