waterloowonder, on 08 September 2017 - 12:08 PM, said:
That is not correct. Defiance loses very few in any athletes to Tinora or Ayersville. They lose some students thru open enrollment, but not athletes. Defiance's downturn in football is mainly attributed the drastic change in the demographics of the population of the town. There is hardly any middle class in Defiance anymore. There are very few athletes walking the halls of DHS that are not playing football. The football talent pool just isn't there.
I'll very respectfully disagree.
The families that would normally send their kids to Defiance now live in the outskirts where it's Tinora Schools. As they currently are, Tinora Schools are better than Defiance Schools so parents are relocating there. I have family in the Defiance area and they tell me all new building developments are in Tinora schools. Athletes aren't open-enrolling to play sports at Tinora, they are just going to Tinora and happen to be athletes.
I'll also argue that "there are very few athletes walking the halls of DHS that are not playing football". There have been some BIG stud pitches come out of DHS lately, Smiddy and Kime, neither played football all the way through, both were 6'4"+ and 200lbs+. Who was the all state basketball player that took you to a state title? Singleton? Did he play football? The athletes are there, they are not playing football.
I'll concede the point on demographics and lets call it exactly what it is, a lot of upper middle class white families don't like their kids being around a lot of "brown" people. That's calling a spade a spade and that's exactly what it is. You can trace the downfall of that to the downfall of GM in Defiance. I read a great story by the Crescent the other day about the 1997 DHS State title team and you read the names like Mendoza, Ortiz, Euruste, but I'm going to guess their parents probably worked with the parents of Ward, Williamson, etc. so nobody had any issues.
Defiance has dropped from Division 2 in the early 00's to currently Division 3
Tinora is now a "big" D6 team with 133 boys per the OHSAA (D5 starts at 144 boys) - For Reference Ayersville only has 84 boys, so about 2/3 of what Tinora has
This is the same type of stuff that was happening when I was coaching in the Lima area, so I know what I'm talking about.
I've known Krouse for about two decades and I've always found him to be an extremely overrated coach and always notice that they get completely out-coached every time they reach the playoffs? They make no adjustments and he hasn't evolved.
Edited by The Guilty Bystander, 08 September 2017 - 03:08 PM.