By Russell Bush
There has always been a discussion if you have good middle school football teams that the consensus is that you will have good high school teams. The flip side of that of course, is that if you have bad middle school teams then you will have bad high school teams. I hate to burst a lot of bubbles but that thought is a bunch of bull. I will explain my thoughts on why I don’t necessarily believe those statements are true.
First of all, kids change from middle to high school. Some kids get bigger and then some that are big in middle school never grow. They may have excelled at the middle level because they were bigger than others, then everyone in high school catches up with them. In some cases, kids outgrow the position they played in middle school. For example, one child might be a running back in middle school and end up being a lineman in high school.
It is also very difficult to keep kids together from the sixth grade through high school. If you can keep a core group of kids together all the way through to graduation and they were successful on the middle level, then the chances of being successful in high school goes up dramatically. With that being said, however, it is almost impossible to keep all of them together. There are injuries or kids get tired of playing football and there are just too many variables to factor in at a public school.
One variable a lot of people don’t think about is that when they get to high school, kids go into the mix with kids that have already been there for a couple of years. In most schools’ kids play two years in middle school and then four years of high school and playing time is limited for newcomers. Chemistry here is important because the middle kids who are used to playing with each other are now in the mix with three-year players, and that affects chemistry.
One example I like to use is one of my nephews. When he was in the eighth grade, his middle team went 2-5 which is not good. When he was a junior in high school, his team won a state championship and his senior year they brought home a silver ball. So, his middle team’s record didn’t account for a lot, did it? My point is there are just too many things that can happen that create a change for better or worse from middle to high school.
I will say this, however – although it is not the final verdict, if your middle school is good or bad, it is an indicator of what will happen. I think the key is how many years you sustain success at the middle level. One year of success or failure at the middle level is not a true indicator, but if a middle school has a standing record of having a winning program, I believe that translates to winning at the high school level.
