Lazard plays in Ames tonight
- Thread starter Dryburn
- Start date
Yeah I don't care who says it, but valley stadium is VALLEYS stadium. Dowling shells out some cash to play there 4 times a year. Not a shared stadium.
This is mostly dead-on IMO. Spending money on a stadium would be a very poor use of limited funds. Dowling just did an upgrade of the physical school facility which required a large amount of fund-raising. Instead of using funds on a football stadium, they pay for use of other stadiums. I believe it is accurate to say that East High benefits from Dowling paying to use Williams Stadium during the playoffs. And Valley charges Dowling a lot to use the stadium. There's no "mooching" involved.
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Never seen so many 4th down conversions on ones own side of the field in my life.
Tuition assistance based on income. Available for any student not just athletes. I was there in the late 70's and never saw any recruiting going on. And that was when several guys went to ISU from Dowling (West Des Moines kids) including John Quinn, Mike Schwartz, Jack Seabrooke, Brian Neal. Dowling won every Metro game for 10 years. (The other half of that Dowling team in 76-77 went to Iowa including Jim Swift and Phil Seuss, both West Des Moines kids) If they did transfer in it was because they wanted to play for Coach Williams All the kids on those teams were WDSM boys with a few Southsiders. The Metro schools couldn't figure out that maybe developing a youth football league might be beneficial since Dowling had already been running it's parochial youth league for years. Maybe it was happening in the 80's and 90's.
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To hear somebody say that Dowling did not recruit in the 70's is a joke. I graduated HS in 73. I met a guy a work that spring who was pretty good size (about 6'3, 200#), full beard, etc... I ask him where he went to school and if he played football. Turns out he was only a sophomore, and he said he played for Dowling. His comment was something like "pretty hard not to accept the scholarship they offered me". That was when I first realized how they were so good year after year. I live in Chicago now and the parochial school still recruit (often under the claim that "we are a private school, we have to recruit all of our students". Interesting how they reach out to the stud athletes but don't the average student.
That was true much of the time . . . but at key points in the 3rd and 4th Qs, balls being were thrown into double-coverage, but not to Lazard. If it is 3rd and 9, I would consider lobbing it to Lazard at least some of the time, even if double-covered.
It was a shame that the gameplan reduced him to a decoy for nearly the entire game. I selfishly wish that Lazard had been given more opportunity to show what he can do, so I could have seen it in person. But it seems like it would have been good for Urbandale, especially when Ames got a big lead and it was clear that the original gameplan wasn't going to erase a double-digit deficit.
What I don't get is how getting a scholarship is really any incentive? The parents pay for the public school system no matter where the kid goes to school. The scholarship only erases (and maybe not even all of it) the additional cost of attending a private school.
Unless there are other, real transactions going down under the table, then I don't see how the recruiting argument holds any water (and I went to public school and hated private schools for a long time because of the "recruiting").
No reason other than the idea that if you recruit a team full of stud athletes, you want to be a part of that team.
Though nowadays this happens in public school. There's been a lot of examples in many sports in Central Iowa recently.
Not claiming that Dowling doesn't recruit a little. Guys have to come to then and have to pay tuition, which is prohibitive for a lot of people. There is tuition assistance based on income, but this is not exclusive to athletes.
Boyle is a really bad example. His sister (not a big-time athlete) went to Dowling long before it was known Ryan would be a good football player.
Also, and I know this is less of an issue in Iowa, parents might want their kids to get a private school education. Public schools suck big time in many places (Chicago being a big example).
As indicated in my post, no, she was not a great athlete. Played a couple sports, but certainly not the level that would have been "recruited". Boyles moved to West Des Moines area after Maytag closing. Boyle's older sister started at Dowling when Ryan would have been in 6th grade.
Clearly skipped over the parenthesis part, I've failed too much in this thread and will now avoid it.
Good day.
I really want to be friends with you. Your whole "we pay taxes to something we don't use" argument is stupid because that's your choice. It would be like my company taking $4000 off of my salary, but offering me a vehicle slightly below what I preferred, only for me to turn that vehicle down and buy my own. Then, on top of that, I force my employer to provide a garage.
That looks like proof. Some guy you didn't know said "something like" this or that in the 1970's. Ames boy can talk of personal experience. I can as well. Kids have all gone to Dowling. And yes, there are financial need scholarships. They have nothing to do with athleticism. Equally granted to athlete/non-athlete.
There are certainly people (like Gafford this year) who approach Dowling out of an interest to play at a much better program and have a better shot at getting noticed by colleges. But Dowling (and Xavier which I'm also very familiar with) has built the program they have from guys who came up through the parochial system. The perception from some people that Dowling has teams of pepole out recruiting and drawing players and paying them with scholarships is just not true.
