Some schools don’t care about winning. When we moved across country I chose the school district based on its academics. They stunk at everything but country club sports. There are four country clubs within the school’s district zone. My kids played multiple sports. But I’ll limit the conversation to baseball and softball.
A new AD came in when my daughter was in 7th grade. He had been an assistant AD at a district accustomed to winning. He started bringing in new coaches.
The year before my daughter entered high school the previous softball coach was fired. The team had.a 32 game losing streak with in the previous two years. They were 4-18 the year the coach was fired. He was nothing but adult supervision. He hasn’t even played baseball in high school. The environment was more like intramurals than varsity.
The new coach was an All Big Ten softball player. She was also the roving hitting coach in a major travel program (14u to 18u Gold). She was fortunate to inherit five freshman who would go on to play D1. They were all in quality travel programs. Two, including my daughter were in the travel program she came from. By the time my daughter was a senior the starting lineup was seven future D1’s, two D2’s and a D3 who barely got on the high school field. With this talent and one of the top pitchers in the state my daughter may be one of the few whose high school team could beat her travel team. They won four consecutive conference titles with three trips to states. After a one year drop off when “the five” graduated the team resumed winning.
The baseball team had seventeen losing seasons in twenty years before the new AD had enough. The coach was a nice guy, supervisor. The parents owned him. There was baseball talent in the district. They were all avoiding the high school program playing for Catholics and privates. We considered letting my son leave for one of the privates recruiting him. He decided to stay long enough to see what the new coach would do.
Varsity was terrible when he was a freshman on the JV team. The next three years they had a second and two conference titles. After my son was gone they kept on winning. His coach was a former D2 All American. All the assistants and the JV coaches played college ball.
The difference is the old AD was interested in pleasing parents and being non confrontational. Success was control freak parents being happy. The new AD was interested in winning and didn’t give a damn what the parents thought. He refused to meet with parents unless the coach was in the room.
Over the eight years my two kids were at the high school the new AD replaced almost every coach and turned every team into winners. But, ask parents in general and the old AD was the good guy and the new AD was a (bleeeeeeeeeep, bleep, bleep). It seemed a lot more kids got “screwed” by the newly hired coaches who were hired to win. What the new AD did was hire all the best, young, up and coming top assistants from the area and made them head coaches.
College ball at D1’s was win or lose your job.