Multiple Middle School teams per grade.

CometGetIt

CometGetIt

Active member
Are there many division 5,6,7 schools that field more than one team per grade for middle school basketball? Or do most just make cuts?
 
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CometGetIt said:
Are there many division 5,6,7 schools that field more than one team per grade for middle school basketball? Or do most just make cuts?
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Ottawa Glandorf (D5 this season) has 3 Junior Highs (Ottawa Elementary, Sts Peter and Paul and Glandorf Elementary) that have 7th and 8th grade teams......so there are 40-45 kids playing on the three teams in 7th and 8th grade......meaning 25-30 kids getting a lot of court time in games. Their freshmen team regularly has to cut multiple kids after tryouts. I don't think any other team in the WBL even has 2 junior high teams feeding into their HS
 
tcgobucks said:
Ottawa Glandorf (D5 this season) has 3 Junior Highs (Ottawa Elementary, Sts Peter and Paul and Glandorf Elementary) that have 7th and 8th grade teams......so there are 40-45 kids playing on the three teams in 7th and 8th grade......meaning 25-30 kids getting a lot of court time in games. Their freshmen team regularly has to cut multiple kids after tryouts. I don't think any other team in the WBL even has 2 junior high teams feeding into their HS
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No other school has that. That is what makes OG unique in that regard even though they are one of the smallest schools in the WBL. 5 starters from each MS team at minimum would be 15 players and naturally creates competition.
 
Insane92 said:
No other school has that. That is what makes OG unique in that regard even though they are one of the smallest schools in the WBL. 5 starters from each MS team at minimum would be 15 players and naturally creates competition.
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Correct.....but I would say in most years of the 15 guys starting as 8th graders, maybe 8 have a legititmate shot at starting as a freshman
 
Our school is starting gain numbers again with "too many" for one 7th and one 8th team. They are considering cuts which sounds like an awful idea to me. Choosing who's good enough for the program at that age is a recipe for disaster. When I was in school we had an A and B team or League and Non League for Jr High. My senior year our leading scorer had never made the A/League team in Jr High. That's probably not very common but it definitely happens enough to matter.
 
I know Princeton has multiple 7/8 grade teams both in boys and girls basketball. What’s real quite about jr high sports is their baseball program might start producing varsity players that are ready to play
 
Until this year, Wooster had two 7th grade and two 8th grade boys teams until this year, but still had to make cuts. The varsity typically included at least a couple of kids who started on the "B" teams.
 
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SLB22 said:
I know Princeton has multiple 7/8 grade teams both in boys and girls basketball. What’s real quite about jr high sports is their baseball program might start producing varsity players that are ready to play
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All of the GMC schools used to have multiple 7th and 8th grade teams in basketball, but not all do anymore. Lakota East and West have 4 middle schools that feed into them, so they have 4 teams in each grade for the 2 high schools. Oak Hills still has 3 middle school teams, and Colerain still has 2. Princeton is the only school with one middle school that still does 2 teams. Sycamore, Mason, Middletown, and Fairfield all have only one middle school, and have now shrunk to one middle school team per grade whereas, in the past, they used to have 2. Hamilton still has 2 middle schools, but has consolidated those into one team per grade. Every now and then, one of the high schools with multiple middle school teams has had their teams meet in the finals of the 8th grade tournament and then everyone gets really excited about that class coming up to high school! And they don't always work out!
 
tcgobucks said:
Correct.....but I would say in most years of the 15 guys starting as 8th graders, maybe 8 have a legititmate shot at starting as a freshman
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And just to be clear, Ottawa Elementary hasn’t had a kid get varsity minutes in at least 10 years, maybe more. OE is producing nothing in virtually any sport. .
 
FlightCrew said:
And just to be clear, Ottawa Elementary hasn’t had a kid get varsity minutes in at least 10 years, maybe more. OE is producing nothing in virtually any sport. .
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Is there a reason for that?

Also, don't kids from the Catholic school sometimes go to different high schools? I have a friend I think went there and then went to high school at Grove.
 
CometGetIt said:
Is there a reason for that?

Also, don't kids from the Catholic school sometimes go to different high schools? I have a friend I think went there and then went to high school at Grove.
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Riff raff moved in to flood zone is part of it, so majority of OE is low income and some hispanic who could care less about sports. The money goes to Glandorf or the Catholic school.
 
CometGetIt said:
Sounds like they need people willing to put in the work to create buy-in and build them up rather than coast on a steady stream of natural talent.
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Lol.....you obviously don't know alot about the OG program. Those kids start playing in 2nd or 3rd grade. Half the kids playing Varsity last year were the kids of former players. Is there some natural talent, sure, but you don't get enough natural talent in a district as small as OG to compete with the teams they compete with year in and year out at the regional and state level. It comes from years of growing into the system.
 
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tcgobucks said:
Lol.....you obviously don't know anything about the OG program. Those kids start playing in 2nd or 3rd grade. Half the kids playing Varsity last year were the kids of former players. Is there some natural talent, sure, but you don't get enough natural talent in a district as small as OG to compete with the teams they compete with year in and year out at the regional and state level. It comes from years of growing into the system.
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I'm very familiar with OG. My comment was directed towards the description of OE not contributing to the varsity program because it's too full of "low income riff raff and Hispanics."
It takes more effort and care to take kids behind the proverbial 8-ball and build them up than relying on economically stable or well off kids from talented families.
 
tcgobucks said:
Lol.....you obviously don't know alot about the OG program. Those kids start playing in 2nd or 3rd grade. Half the kids playing Varsity last year were the kids of former players. Is there some natural talent, sure, but you don't get enough natural talent in a district as small as OG to compete with the teams they compete with year in and year out at the regional and state level. It comes from years of growing into the system.
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Who besides White and Fortman?
 
tcgobucks said:
That was supposed to say the past few years. Maag, Schomaeker, Unterbrink, Balbaugh, Fuka
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no disrespect to them, but I mean we’re talking about one contributor there in the past. We can agree on this. It’s definitely changed. There needs to be more work in the youth level and junior high-level. If the program is going to continue to have the unprecedented success it has had the last 20 years.
 
In our area the only program that has multiple teams at both junior high levels would be Warren Local. They field Warren Blue and Warren White each year, they evenly divide those teams so no true A or B team. I would say the numbers they produce for a D4 SEO program are very much a reason for some of their yearly success.
 
Once upon a time Lima City Schools had three 8th grade teams and three 7th grade teams. Now this was due to having 3 middle schools certainly. Now LCS has two middle schools and I believe two 7th and two 8th grade teams.

There was also a time when Lima Senior had a 10th grade team. I want to say the GMC by-laws required each school field a 9th, 10th, JV and Varsity teams.

I want to say maybe 20-25 years ago Lima Senior was fielding two 9th grade teams (Red and Grey).
 
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Urbana had two 7th and two 8th grade teams when I played. I'm now here in Lebanon, which is a significantly larger school district and they have the same - two teams for 7th and two for 8th. I would've expected one more given the size discrepancy between Lebanon and Urbana, but no, the same amount of kids get a chance to play.
 
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scbuckeye99 said:
Once upon a time Lima City Schools had three 8th grade teams and three 7th grade teams. Now this was due to having 3 middle schools certainly. Now LCS has two middle schools and I believe two 7th and two 8th grade teams.

There was also a time when Lima Senior had a 10th grade team. I want to say the GMC by-laws required each school field a 9th, 10th, JV and Varsity teams.

I want to say maybe 20-25 years ago Lima Senior was fielding two 9th grade teams (Red and Grey).
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Yup! Every GMC school had 2 freshmen teams and 1 sophomore team until at least the late 2000s, with the sophomore teams getting the 4:30 slot ahead of JV and varsity. Then, some of the GMC schools started playing their freshmen “A” teams against the sophomore schedule, and they eventually shifted to singular freshmen teams in that 4:30 slot. Program construction was different at that point too. Schools would basically keep all of their non-seniors outside their top 7-8 down on JV, and they would dress varsity and maybe get a few minutes. In turn, any sophomore outside the top 7-8 on JV played down on the sophomore team and then dressed for the JV game. Freshmen didn’t play JV at all unless they were good enough to start. Overall, this made the jump from JV to varsity much easier for players (now, I feel the jump is massive as there are several star JV players from last year in the GMC that might not even be contributors for their teams this year) and I think the quality of play of the sophomore teams was closer to the quality of JV teams now. It was not uncommon to see sophomore team players eventually start on varsity as seniors. It helped that all of the star football and baseball players would stay in the basketball program so schools could pull this off.
 
JBaller said:
Yup! Every GMC school had 2 freshmen teams and 1 sophomore team until at least the late 2000s, with the sophomore teams getting the 4:30 slot ahead of JV and varsity. Then, some of the GMC schools started playing their freshmen “A” teams against the sophomore schedule, and they eventually shifted to singular freshmen teams in that 4:30 slot. Program construction was different at that point too. Schools would basically keep all of their non-seniors outside their top 7-8 down on JV, and they would dress varsity and maybe get a few minutes. In turn, any sophomore outside the top 7-8 on JV played down on the sophomore team and then dressed for the JV game. Freshmen didn’t play JV at all unless they were good enough to start. Overall, this made the jump from JV to varsity much easier for players (now, I feel the jump is massive as there are several star JV players from last year in the GMC that might not even be contributors for their teams this year) and I think the quality of play of the sophomore teams was closer to the quality of JV teams now. It was not uncommon to see sophomore team players eventually start on varsity as seniors. It helped that all of the star football and baseball players would stay in the basketball program so schools could pull this off.
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I'd be curious if any other leagues back then or even now operated sophomore teams. With Lima being out of the GMC for almost 25 years now I really haven't kept up with what the GMC currently does in that regard.
 
When I played we had 2 teams per grade. Even after closing both of the old middle schools and combining into 1. Lately it’s been 1 team per grade. But they are dressing 16 kids. Doesn’t make sense to me.
 
I assign BBK from D1 to D7 schools. It is hit or miss. Big schools may only have one JH team per year, some years they have two 7th and two 8th. Small schools are the same.
 
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