Dave Cooks out as coach at Marquette High

[IWB]

Where did MUHS pull their students from "back in the day?" Milwaukee? Inner suburbs like Tosa? How does it differ now?

Well - first off, Marquette is not hurting for students. They are at the same enrollment they always have been. With sports, I think there is a big difference from 'back in the day' until now.

"Back in the day", Catholic grade schools really were the only ones with sports. Basketball, football... in public schools you didn't have sports until you got to junior high. I knew a few non-catholic guys in grade school that actually took CCD classes and transferred into Catholic Schools just so they could play sports. Back then, the Catholic Schools were the feeder programs.

Today, all of the public high schools have feeder programs and they start earlier than the Catholic schools ever did. As Eddie pointed out, many of these kids start playing for a team early on and are with that team for 6 years before ever thinking about what high school to go to. That includes Catholic school kids too. There are many that I know that both parents went to Catholic grade schools and high schools but the kid has been playing for "XYZ Program" and wants to continue.....

Another issue is cost. People are not as willing to dedicate the costs for Catholic schools as they used to be, part of it is because of these feeder programs. There is a feeder baseball program where I live. They are switching from one league to another, in order to play more games. Now they will be playing like 74 games this summer. 74! These are 4th graders! So, the cost to play is like $300. Not a deal breaker. But how many out of town tournaments do they have? These families are getting hotel rooms every other weekend. Why? So little Junior can get a jump on high school tryouts in 5 years? These costs add up in a big way. So, when you are spending $10k per year on junior's baseball & soccer career, no way you can throw down more for school.

Final issue is that "back in the day", Catholic families had 5-6-8 kids per family. Now a typical Catholic family has 2 kids, 4 if a big family. The numbers just aren't there.

One last rant on select crap....

I have a friend who always bought into this stuff on the soccer side. Always told me "If you want to play in high school you have to start with select teams this early"... "you have to enter these tournaments"... "You have to scale down what sports you play and play 'your sport' year round!" Well, their older daughter is now a junior in high school. Raised all sorts of money so her travel team could go to tournaments in California and then Vegas. Great, right? After thousand and thousands and thousands of dollars, their daughter returned from the Vegas tournament and announced that she no longer wanted to play.

Yep - Burnt out at the age of 16, sick of the sport she played 365 days per year for the last 6 years. They were shocked, I wasn't surprised one bit.