High School Recruiting

Probably the hottest topic in all of high school sports nowadays is recruiting. Not college coaches that are recruiting high school kids to come to their school, but high school coaches that are recruiting 8th graders to come to their high school. This is causing an unbalanced competition throughout the states, well at least my state of New Jersey. This has led to a frenzy among the state officials to change divisions and try to balance the power in each conference. This came about mainly because of one school's dominance in the area this decade; Don Bosco Prep.

Don Bosco Prep has been the most dominant force in all sports since about the turn of the millennium. The football team is ranked Nationally every year, and has not lost to a New Jersey team in almost 3 years. The basketball team has won the Bergen County Tournament 3 consecutive years. The baseball team went undefeated last year, and was ranked #1 Nationally by some magazines. The reason for this in my opinion, is the recruiting that is going on. I understand that a school can recruit itself, but when you have a baseball team that has 8 Division 1 players, when no other team in the county has more than 1 or 2, and a football team that consistently sends players to big-time schools, there has to be some kind of recruitment of these top players that is going on. There are 2 other schools in the area that are able to get such kids, yet it seems that Bosco has been getting the best of the best for the past 5-6 years, in each sport. This is making more and more teams in the area, to want to get Bosco and these parochial powers out of their conferences and into their own.

The state has tried to com bate this problem by re-aligning the conferences and making it more competitive. But what came out of this was not a solution but just bigger problems. Stay tuned for the next entry about "Realigning; Hurting or Helping".