Post by hsrose on Nov 14, 2012 17:19:59 GMT -6
The question I have is do you think it is better to have Freshmen and JV teams of 18-25’ish, or a single Frosh-Soph team of 36-40? My preference after this past year is for the single team.
The 7 schools in our league have historically had 3 levels of teams Freshmen, JV, and varsity. The participation has dropped at 5 of the schools and possibly the other 2 as well. Our school didn’t have the numbers over the summer so we dropped the Frosh program for this year and went with a Frosh-Soph team. We picked up some more players right as fall practice started, but we had 35 on the team which still wasn’t really enough to split into the Frosh and JV squads. There were 4 Sophs up on varsity, 25 Frosh and 9 Sophs on JV. Generally the varsity pulls up 2-5 sophs, the JV pulls up an equal number from the Freshmen team. The other teams didn’t do that, they still had all 3 levels. Our coach caught some flak, especially when we had 30+ players dressed and the other JV would have 22, one had 19. So this wasn’t an isolated situation. So while we had a single team of 35, the opponents would have a frosh of 23'ish and a JV of 20'ish.
The schools generally get around 30 Freshmen out, but the numbers drop off substantially after that (yes, retention needs work, and they need to study) so the mix of players is usually a big factor. Low numbers of returners in a single class can be handled, but two years in a row and things don’t work well.
The word is that the other schools looked at what we did and are thinking about recommending doing away with the Freshmen team in the league. It saves money overall and the rosters are bigger. Just have the league/unspoken rule that no Juniors on the team, only Frosh and Soph’s and move on.
I know that it was really nice to have the numbers for practice, but not everyone got as much game time as they/we would have liked. And, the biggest lesson I learned is that Fr-So is NOT JV, my expectations were all honked up and that caused me a lot of frustration. But if I/we had set the expectations more realistically I would have handled the summer a lot better.
The 7 schools in our league have historically had 3 levels of teams Freshmen, JV, and varsity. The participation has dropped at 5 of the schools and possibly the other 2 as well. Our school didn’t have the numbers over the summer so we dropped the Frosh program for this year and went with a Frosh-Soph team. We picked up some more players right as fall practice started, but we had 35 on the team which still wasn’t really enough to split into the Frosh and JV squads. There were 4 Sophs up on varsity, 25 Frosh and 9 Sophs on JV. Generally the varsity pulls up 2-5 sophs, the JV pulls up an equal number from the Freshmen team. The other teams didn’t do that, they still had all 3 levels. Our coach caught some flak, especially when we had 30+ players dressed and the other JV would have 22, one had 19. So this wasn’t an isolated situation. So while we had a single team of 35, the opponents would have a frosh of 23'ish and a JV of 20'ish.
The schools generally get around 30 Freshmen out, but the numbers drop off substantially after that (yes, retention needs work, and they need to study) so the mix of players is usually a big factor. Low numbers of returners in a single class can be handled, but two years in a row and things don’t work well.
The word is that the other schools looked at what we did and are thinking about recommending doing away with the Freshmen team in the league. It saves money overall and the rosters are bigger. Just have the league/unspoken rule that no Juniors on the team, only Frosh and Soph’s and move on.
I know that it was really nice to have the numbers for practice, but not everyone got as much game time as they/we would have liked. And, the biggest lesson I learned is that Fr-So is NOT JV, my expectations were all honked up and that caused me a lot of frustration. But if I/we had set the expectations more realistically I would have handled the summer a lot better.
