Schools in Maryland are refusing to play St Frances

I have been following this situation closely.
Here are some of the facts:

The school is a very small (172 total students) predominately African American Catholic school in a very impoverished part of Baltimore.
It is the oldest Catholic School in the country.

They compete in a private School league that has several other much larger Catholic Schools and a couple of high end prep schools in it. It is a very competitive league, and there was a lot of competition for players, including recruiting public school student athletes. In Maryland, the private schools do not compete against the public schools for State Championships. They have their own leagues.

They discontinued and then reintroduced football several years ago, and they were not very good. One of my former players coached there at this time.

They brought in a new coaching staff a couple of years ago. The new head coach had previously been at one of the prep schools for 17 years. He brought his staff with him.
The current co-head coach laid out $60,00 of his own money (he is a hedge fund manager) as a seed fund.
He spent a year as a co-head coach at the University of Michigan, then returned.
He sponsors 40 kids at over $9,000 per year tuition, plus finds housing for many of them. According to the school, many of these kids are considered "homeless".
They recruit heavily, not only kids from the local area, but several from out of State and the Mid Atlantic Region:, Philly, Virginia, and France ( kid is 6'-5" and weighs 286). The thought is that they are trying to be the IMG Academy of Maryland.

Some of their recruiting tactics are high pressure, going into the public schools, emailing and texting kids constantly.
Some of this is questionable ethically. (If I found that a coach from another school was coming into my building and asking the guidance department for grade records, I'd have him thrown out of the building so fast that his ass would leave skid marks on the floor)
One of the public school ADs provided proof of this.
When I hear coaches at the private schools talk about their "recruiting budget,"  all I can do as a coach in the public school system is shake my head. We are bound by strictly enforced residency requirements. There are few ways around these but for the most part, you play with those you got.

To say they are loaded is an understatement. They had 11 kids sign D1 scholarships last year. One of their recruiting ploys is to guarantee kids that they will get a D1 scholarship.

The other schools in the league are dealing with parents who are afraid that the physical mismatches will result in injuries to their kids. There are questions about liability due to the significant disparity of size and talent.

A co-head coach in the program described those teams who refused to play this team of essentially high school all stars, as cowards.

And then there is the race card being played. Most of the other schools in the league are predominately white.
It's a very unfortunate situation.

Yet another team in the league decided not to play St. Frances this fall, citing safety issues. That makes four so far.
If one is to believe the scuttlebutt that has been circulating in the local papers, some of this is payback for the rather blatant recruiting of other team's players.

One of the writers in a local paper told the withdrawing teams to quit complaining and simply emulate St. Frances in the recruiting wars. He doesn't mention the $400,000.00+ dollars kicked in by their HC yearly to house, feed, equip, and educate the kids. Kinda hard for most schools, even wealthy prep schools, to compete with that.

BTW, they were ranked #4 in USA Today's poll last year. 
 

Is the owner of the local paper also the biggest booster of the school? Thats what this sounds like based on experience. Our state has one of the most successful programs in the country, and the guy who donated all the money for their state of the art facilities also owns the local paper (or at least used to, not sure if that's still true.) Needless to say, local sports writer just showers them with praise and acts like their success is 100% related to "hard work" and that their rising tide would lift all of HS football in the area of others would just work as hard.

And the comments section is full of a special brand of idiocy of people that think they are the only program that lifts, trains, and cares and all the other programs are just lazy.

Here in Virginia private and public schools are separate with one exception, a private school that threatened to sue the VHSL and was allowed to join if they agreed to follow VHSL rules. In our area there is a private that has decided to become a national football power. Of Facebook today some of their coaches were complaining that they can't get any of the public schools to let them into 7-on-7's. Well, why would they? If the school is recruiting (And I did say IF) a 7-on-7 is nothing but a combine for them.

In what seems to be a final resolution of this situation, St. Frances will now play an "National" schedule including teams from Florida, New York, Connecticut, Virginia, and four teams from Canada. Only one team from Maryland will play them, D.C. area powerhouse Good Counsel.
The league is trying to determine if the teams who refused to play them will have the dropped games count as a forfeit in their records.