High School Ball- trackers?

[Drew4UTk]

how many of you guys keep track of HS players?  local to you, I mean... 

[rolltidefan]

if there's a big time prospect i'll try to catch a game or 2, and i'll watch their announcement, but unless it's bama, i don't follow much after that. if there's not any big time kids, i just go to my hs alma mater if i go at all. used to go quite a bit, but with young kids and their own sports/events, it's getting harder to find time to go.

i did follow some that i played with/against. but they're all done. couple played in nfl for short stints, but out now.

[Drew4UTk]

i've got something about to roll out- beta form almost a release candidate.. and it delves into HS prospects and granting them opportunity to socialize their 'resume' so to speak.  

i'm thinking it would be neat to allow them to leverage our presence on the web, which isn't bad at all for a two year old site, for their gain in a possible opportunity for exposure. 

on that same stream of conscious, so to speak, it would be even better it there were 'locals' here who could paint the players for us... we could talk them up if deserving.  it would help them and help us, too.. 

[FearlessF]

I'm all for it.

NW Iowa isn't a hot spot for P5 recruits, and I don't follow the HS stuff as much now that my daughters are out.

[Anonymous Coward]

This may change when I have kids, pending their interests, or if we make great friends with neighbors who recruit us to games, but I never attended games or followed football in high school (was on several travel hockey teams, so it was a conflict). I also didn't watch any football until college, except for a few Super Bowls. Then in A2, I picked it up bigtime because it served a social purpose. For that reason, I doubt my football interests have the potential to branch beyond college, in either direction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also: From the title, I thought this thread was going to link to a surprising article about a high school league experimenting with GPS or other tracking inside footballs. Ha!

[ELA]

Also: From the title, I thought this thread was going to link to a surprising article about a high school league experimenting with GPS or other tracking inside footballs. Ha!

Same

[OrangeAfroMan]

I keep meaning to go check out the biggest HS games in the Phoenix area in the fall, but I usually wind up falling asleep after a long week of teaching.  

[betarhoalphadelta]

I keep meaning to go check out the biggest HS games in the Phoenix area in the fall, but I usually wind up falling asleep after a long week of teaching.  

My wife and I have talked about going to do this on some random Friday just as a fun event. There are a lot of high-end teams in this area, and my wife went to HS at Long Beach Poly [same HS as Snoop lol], and I think they're pretty good. I almost went out to see a QB who had signed with Purdue last fall, but never actually managed to go do it.
Maybe this fall we'll actually get around to it.

[Brutus Buckeye]

My old HS is now three HSs. 

[Drew4UTk]

the moderators can 'see' what i'm doing here- it's almost to the point of being released. 

there is method to my madness- i hope.  

while sitting in boredom at work (which is a good thing, you don't want me to be busy, akin to a fireman) i did some google keyword research and found that there is zero notta zilch market for potential recruits to post their data... which took me to NCAA rulings and researching the limitations on that, and to find that an athlete can make contact whenever and however they want- it's the coaches/staff that encounter contact limits soon thereafter.  which took me to 'how to contact athletic departments' which was perhaps the easiest part of the equation believe it or not. 

so what i'm going to attempt is a section atop all other sections which allows student athletes who have not been contacted or marketed by the various services to post their own 'profile'- i.e. crucial data and stats... then the AD's will be notified of the posting.  Hopefully it may generate some leads for smaller schools and link up some HS or JUCO players along the way.  It should, for us and while honing in on keywords, land us in the realm of what's referred to as 'authority' page rank instead of in the muck and mire of 'message boards'.  

by my reckoning, it will be fun for all of us- and it may provide a service to the community?  we'll see... though i love our community the way it is, in this world- if you ain't growing your dying. 

[ELA]

Pre kids, hell, pre marriage, my wife (teacher) and I used to do "crowd control" at her HS football games.  That pretty much consisted of yelling at 12 year olds to stop fighting in the concession areas.  But her community got really into it.  The neighborhood across from the school was packed with parked cars, tons of the tailgating.  Western PA HS football was very different from my experience in MI.  Her school was decent back then, but they have gone in the tank since.  I think they broke a 3 year losing streak this year.  Not a 3 year streak of losing records, mind you, they lost every game for 3 straight years, before going like 2-7 this year.  We've taken our boys to our HS each of the past couple years.  They like it, and I wouldn't take a kid to a Steelers game.  Just a bunch of dudes with nothing to lose, looking for a fight.  I've thought about a Pitt game, or a lower level, like Duquesne or Robert Morris, but come Saturday afternoon, if I feel like watching college football, I have a hard time making it Pitt or Duquesne.

[OrangeAfroMan]

Yeah, high school football is fickle - you lose a coach or a star player, and a team can fall off a cliff.  We got booted in the first round of the playoffs both years I was on varsity, but as a 5A in FL, we were pretty legit overall.  The class one year younger than me was very good, but after that, things fell off.

It's funny, we had a young, excitable assistant coach with us my SR year who was basically a "keep the energy high" guy and now he's HC and his son just signed with Florida.  Can't believe he's still there 20 years later.  

Anyway, making the playoffs both years I played isn't bad - how many can say that?  When I was on the FR team, the varsity made the final 4 in the state.  Those were the days, lol.

[ELA]

Yeah, we were good at just about everything but football when I was in HS.  We won 8 state championships my freshman year alone.  But we never even made the state playoffs for football.  They did expand them the year after I graduated, so that my freshman and senior year teams would have, but still.  I think a couple years after I graduated we made the state semis, that has to have been their only great year in the past 25 years.  I think we won a couple state titles back in the 80s, and I had a teacher who made sure to tell us that he played on our state title team back in 1962 as often as he could possibly find a reason to bring it up.