Season is driving me crazy

How about 4...in a row

I disagree. There are some cultures where after family, football is #1. In great programs the whole team has this mentality. In good ones most have it. In bad ones the majority do not. For me personally, I never missed practice or a game for anything when I was playing.

We had that year last year. Looking better this year at 3-3 but this week has been something.

Starting OLB/FB is pulled from school because his dad thinks we are wasting the talent of the best back in the area. Starting Mike/TE is probably down with a concussion after today. Original starting TE broke his collar bone several weeks ago. Now a freshman starting at mike and no depth at our Y and LB group.

We have all been there and it doesn't take much for stuff to roll down hill.

Three strongest kids in the program and 2 way starters
OL- transferred to large school for exposure--> GONE
OL- torn pinkie ligament--> surgery OUT
RB- torn meniscus--> surgery OUT

Starters out just this week plus those above.
S/WR- torn ACL--> OUT
RB- broken tibia--> OUT
MLB- concussion--> OUT
NT- shoulder--> OUT
LT/DE- dislocated knee--> OUT

This is for program that had 40 max kids Day 1.

We're coming up on the end of the quarter next week, the 14th, meaning some of our players will be leaving us after that game because they have not been getting their grades.

One kid has 4 F's. 1 in Digital Photography. 1 in PE, he says the female teacher hates him because he asked her for her number. 1 in Advisory, which is the do your homework class. The other is in Biology which apparently he can fix if he would turn in the homework. He's a sophomore. Could be pretty good but he was raised by his biker gang father so he has a different outlook on authority figures.

Two brothers are looking at social probation, which means no extracurricular activities at all for 6 weeks, because they can't get up in the morning. They both have 8 tardy's and on 10, they go social probation, school board policy. Just too tired to get to school on time on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Just got an email from a parent, a local pastor, who informed me that if his son gets an F he will remove him from the team. Hey dad, here were you 4 weeks ago when you could have done something about this? This is the same player that we suspended 2 games for an incident in the lunch line with a girl. Was a deal with the school so he would not get a sexual harassment incident. I'm there when he tells dad, the preacher, that he's not clear on what happened, or why this is an issue. Reality is he told the girl, after he 'bumped' her and she called him on it, that he hoped she would commit $%^*(^ suicide and (*&^$& die. But that's not what he told dad. And because we/football handled it, dad doesn't know the details.

Just got a new player yesterday. Foster care, has not yet been to school this year. Transferred here by the system because he is under a death sentence by a gang in his home town. Parents are both dead, he's 14 and a freshmen. AD tells me that he's cleared to play even though he has not been in school a day, and was in 4 middle schools the last 2 years. If there's no grades then they can't make him ineligible. This kid is one that you want to help succeed, he's talking like he wants to change his life. The other kid, 4-F's, has done nothing to earn any goodwill from anyone so he is likely to get fried.

The past 2 years I have been doing academic progress reports so I can keep up on the grades. Hand them out to the players on Monday, turn them back in before the end of school on Friday. I'm not a teacher/admin here so I don't have access to the online system so I can't check grades. I had the latest set all ready to go, all printed up and sitting on the desk. The new AD comes to visit, to let me know that a school board member was upset at the wait time for coffee in the snack shack line last Friday and that the boosters have to to a better job of things. He has been a teacher for a long time here, never signed the previous progress reports. Now as the AD, he tells me that the does not support my progress reports, thinks they are of no value, does not believe in them, they have tried that before, and that I need to get one of my coaches, the only one I have that is on staff, the Assistant Principal (like he's got time, hard to get him to practice with all his admin duties), to run the grade checks on the kids. But, he warned me that even that doesn't work because the teachers generally don't enter the grades until next week when the quarter ends. I remember watching a grade for my daughter here go from a D to an A to a C and finally a B all in one day as the teacher entered grades. So bottom line is my AD does not support me trying to get the grades for the players.

Otherwise this year is going really well. Best team in a long time, might just make the playoffs, might win 6/7 games and have the best record since 2001 if we win more than 5. Couple of injuries here and there, 4 concussions total after 5 games, but nothing like it was the past couple of years.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<CENSORED>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


enjoy it...

We just lost another one yesterday. 


This time it was a kid that decided to do a back flip off of the stage at lunch....the good new is he only broke his elbow and not his neck. 

Trying to stay optimistic.  

Just to join in, we finished an undefeated regular season Tuesday night with a 50 point win and I've got players/parents mad because the starters only got to play til halftime on 'their' 8th grade night. We were up 40 at the time. And the kids that subbed for them were mostly 8th graders too.

Told this story before here. From 1999 to 2010 the teams I coached on won 90% of the games we played. At one point we averaged 11 wins a season. I took a couple years off (2011 and 2012). Since I've come back we've won 7 games in 4 years. I could write a book about why. Tonight we have a chance to win in conference for the first time in 4 years. (winless in the last 3 seasons and only 5 conference wins since 2011). Selfishly...if my own kids weren't in the program I wouldn't be doing it anymore.

Some of these stories in the thread are crazy. Keep up the good work fellows.

It's not so much the season/wins/losses/kids for me this year, as it is the schedule.

We have a 10 week regular season, but in SC you can petition to play what we call Week Zero; the week usually everyone has their last jamboree/end of preseason. 

We had a odd number of teams in our region, so we married up with the next region over that was also in the same boat and drew lots to match up.  

So we worked it out with the team we drew to move the game back to the non-region portion of our schedule and then scheduled a Week Zero game.  That way we had a bye week during region play.

Then hurricane Matthew came the week of our bye week.  It didn't really affect the Upstate and we had a bye week anyway, but the weather and subsequent flooding cause many schools to miss 2 weeks of school.  So the HSL pushed back the start of playoffs 2 weeks to allow those missed games to be made up before the playoffs started.  That meant that half the state would have had 2 weeks after the conclusion of the regular season before the playoffs started.  So the HSL allowed teams to move one of their final games back a week to alleviate this long lay off.  We moved our last game back a week.

Original schedule:
Regular season - Week 0 (August 19)/Week 1 (August 26) - Week 10 (October 28) with a bye Week 7 for us
Play offs - Round 1 (November 4) - Finals (December 20)

New Schedule - Week 0/1 - Week 10+2 (November 11)
Playoffs - Round 1 (November 18) - Finals (December 17)

So, our end of the year run looks like this:
Sept 30 Region game #1
October 7 original bye week
October 14 Region game #2
October 21 Region game #3
October 28 bye week/original final region game/Week 10
November 4 Region game #4
November 11 bye week/end of regular season
November 18 Playoffs start

So that means that from the start of region play (this determines who makes the playoffs and where you are seeded) until the beginning of the 1st round of the play offs we play 4 games in a 42 day period.

bigmoot
That is what was happening last year during the "1000 year" flood last season, and the HSL got all worried about the ramifications of playing so many games within a short period of time in the age of the concussion. After about it shook out and some teams were going to be playing Mon/Thurs/Sat/Tues/Friday to make things up, they pushed back the play offs a week.
So as soon as the weather hit this year, they pushed things back a week, then when the flooding hit another week.

At least our biggest worry is what to do during these layoffs. Some places have kids that weren't at home, coaches hadn't seen their kids in weeks, didn't have power, schools being used as shelters, etc...

Luckily, the USC stadium schedule isn't that tight. However, any kid that was to be part of the All Star games that is still in the playoffs will miss those for that very reason

poundtherock1 Yeah that is why we wanted to move our game this week back a week.

There is a school near that had worked their schedule so that they would have this week as a bye, right before the playoffs. So they don't have a game to move. They will go 28 days between their last game and their first game of the playoffs.

Of course it could be worse. Another school near here pushed back this week's game to next week. Then, as it turned out, last week's game was a make or break game for them. The lost and now have just extended their season with no hope to continue.