I hate to change subjects but TG brought up football. I spent about 8 years in Texas before returning to Ohio and in both states HS football is king.
Certainly in Texas you almost always have to have a mixed type school to win the state championship. We lived in a town that was in the same district as Odessa Permian, and since my wife was a coach (track/volleyball and later swimming) we went to most of the football games. If you watched Friday Night Lights you’ll see that Odessa lost to Dallas Carter, a completely inner city school seemingly 100% minority if you look at the team. Now as I recall after moving to DFW it was a magnet school and thus for that inner city area, was a good school. Nevertheless they beat Permian that year as the movie shows, and that was a highly unusual. Typically the best teams in Texas are the more upper class schools in a given community, which happens to have just enough minority kids to make them great.
I recall watching our hometown Abilene Cooper in the state championship against Drew Brees’ and Austin Westlake. At that time Cooper was the “nicer” school in town, and Westlake HS was considered the school to be at in Austin.
I don’t have enough date points to see if that’s the case here in SD. LCC in my area seems to be less diverse than the schools we were around in Texas, yet they seem to have pretty good teams. (No CIF titles though). Oceanside has a rough reputation and backs it up on the field. Torrey Pines though has some good football teams with a good API.
It’s different out here…. Maybe the API is more indicative.
Colin Cowherd likes to joke about colleges who start bragging about graduation rates are schools getting their asses kicked on the field. i.e. Stanford, Duke, etc.
Oh I didn’t mention specific minority types but I see that the high school where my wife worked in DFW is ranked number one in the ESPN HS poll. (Euless Trinity). That HS was chock full of Tongans. (Oceanside – Samoans). These Tongans are some big people with broad shoulders and compact powerful torsos. I don’t know if the demographics have changed much at Trinity (10 years ago when I was there) but at that time the football team generally had more Tongans across the O-Line and D-Line than any other race. Trinity was not considered high class, but it was also not inner city Ft. Worth where the teams tended to stink though there were great individual talents. I’ve noticed that nearby town Southlake which is very high class has killer football teams too.
