We are not surprised by the interest in this job," Lancaster principal Scott Burre said. We are the 30th largest high school in the state and we play in a premier conference. This is not a starter job for a young coach. We need someone with experience. Our football program is not broke, by any means."
His "our football program is not broke, by any means" t-shirt has people asking questions already answered by his shirt.
Come on,
man! Enthusiasm, energy and excitement - that's all good. LHS folks and fans should have that in spades going into this next season and the spectacle of crowning a successor to Carpenter. Of course! But must every article on Gales athletics in terms of competitiveness and expectations carry constantly meandering narratives about what the Gales got and how they stand against the OCC? Playing in the OCC is either a good thing, or it isn't. It's not something that the folks on #GranvillePike can keep publicly changing their framing on every other year so that the stories Tom writes on the Gales keep them in a good light. One year its "oh, the OCC is really tough and that's why we don't get a lot of wins in football and basketball", the next year its "we're fine in the OCC but y'know that Pickerington Central school is just really good at basketball and football", the next year its "we beat Pickerington Central in football", then the next year its "we might just join the league idea with Logan and Teays Valley" and now its "we play in a premier conference." For a school that has a lot of good things about its athletic department, that gets an extremely generous amount of dedicated sports coverage compared to what their paper's sister publications give other "town" schools (e.g. Newark and Zanesville) and does decently well (generally) in their Leviathan conference, the Gales sure do love baking in weird grievances about the fact they play in the OCC.
It's a good job. It's a fine job. It's not Dublin Coffman, it's not Massillon Washington, it's not Mount Union, it's not Ohio State, it's not the Dallas Cowboys. It's Lancaster. It's probably a
low-ceiling, high-floor job. It's a job where the expectations may not be that clearly-defined and were probably never at all consistent this previous decade, because the school let Carpenter decide everything program-related (including coaching) on his own terms. Which, they were (probably) correct to do so! It would've been wrong to have a 'hot seat' or Win/Loss metrics that direct renewal/non-renewal decisions. But, like, also, you get the past decade which had just such a widely disparate range of outcomes year-by-year (OCC split in '18-> 2-7 in '19 and 3-6 w/ a loss to Central Crossing in 2020; playoffs two other years and then some mediocre W/L's sprinkled around.) And it's hard to really tell how those teams would've done differently if they didn't run the dang Wing-T.
It's a large exurban high school competing against a thick brush of suburban high schools that have flourished as Columbus and its adjacencies have grown over the past 15 years. A public in a town with two private schools, and one that is flanked by multiple open-enrollments (including one that is very successful at every sport directly to the west.) Compared to other similarly-sized exurban schools (Delaware, Marysville, Mt. Vernon and Newark) that compete(d) in the OCC, schools with less competition in terms of the student-athlete game, Lancaster has been more impressive in terms of their product on the field. And that's a good thing. It's just hard to really tell what more is possibly achievable with Lancaster. And quotes like the above will just invoke eye-rolls.
BTW, Merry Christmas sportfan!