6:30 p.m. Eastern, Bowling Green Purples (35-2) vs. Taylor Mill Scott Eagles (24-12)
8 p.m., Union Cooper Jaguars (31-4) vs. Louisville Fern Creek Tigers (36-2)
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Kentucky High-school Boys' Basketball, Four Teams Left
Semifinals! I'm for BG and Creek.
6:30 p.m. Eastern, Bowling Green Purples (35-2) vs. Taylor Mill Scott Eagles (24-12)
8 p.m., Union Cooper Jaguars (31-4) vs. Louisville Fern Creek Tigers (36-2)
6:30 p.m. Eastern, Bowling Green Purples (35-2) vs. Taylor Mill Scott Eagles (24-12)
8 p.m., Union Cooper Jaguars (31-4) vs. Louisville Fern Creek Tigers (36-2)
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Fern Creek High opened in 1923. From the school website's history:
ReplyDeleteBy 1929, a gym (that would also serve as an auditorium) and four new classrooms were completed. In 1932, the colors black and gold were adopted as Fern Creek's colors, and in 1936 the student body chose the present-day colors of orange and black and the fight song. (Our school crest remains black and gold today to honor those original colors).
In 1941, many schools were consolidated with Fern Creek. The once-rural community was developing into a middle class town. Fern Creek High School continued to grow, and after World War II, new construction was added to the campus. Portable buildings were added between 1947 and 1950. By this time, Valley, Fairdale, Eastern, and Okolona (now Southern) had joined Fern Creek as county high schools.
And here's a very helpful Jefferson County map from 1905.
ReplyDeleteSaturday night:
ReplyDeleteBowling Green Purples 80, Taylor Mill Scott Eagles 79
Union Cooper Jaguars 51, Louisville Fern Creek Tigers 44
So BG beats Cooper, 67-56, and the Purples become our 100th Kentucky high-school boys' basketball champion. Congrats, Purples!
ReplyDeleteBowling Green made its first appearance in the state basketball tournament in 1925, and this was its first championship. The Purples also won the Class 5A football championship this past fall--it was their fifth football title since 2011. Their only other football state championship came in 1995. Bowling Green won a state baseball championship in 1965, and it has never won the girls' basketball title.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, as we talked about on the podcast, it's pretty clear that something has changed with Bowling Green High sports. It's not that they were not competitive in the past, but, in the last several years, they've made the leap to dominant. I'm not sure why. I asked Jason Frakes with The Courier-Journal about this on Twitter--Jason's smart, and he writes about high-school sports, and he went to BGHS--and he wrote back, "Good run of athletes in football/hoops. Expanded classes allowed to dominate 5-A football. Strong coaches." Jason was awfully busy at the moment I asked him, so I'm not sure he would stand by that response as gospel.
The first thing I would be inclined to look at in figuring out why it is that BG has had this surge is if there has been some change in school-registration process. For example, on March 16, I saw an announcement that the deadline for Warren County residents to apply to attend BGHS is April 15. “Families living in Bowling Green and Warren County but outside boundaries of the Bowling Green City School District may apply for their children to attend BGISD as non-resident students,” it read. Warren County is Kentucky's fifth-largest county (behind Jefferson, Fayette, Kenton and Boone), so this might be a satisfying explanation enough for me--if either Warren County's population has charged up the county ranking or this non-resident policy took effect 10 or so years ago.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I would look at the individuals in leadership--boys' basketball coach D.G. Sherrill and football coach Kevin Wallace and whoever is the athletics director, principal, etc. Maybe it's just that BG has hired exceedingly well in the last 10 years or however long these people have had their jobs.
ReplyDeleteSo, anyway, like I said, I don't know what the deal is in Bowling Green now. But I worked as a sportswriter in that town in the early 1990s, and, certainly, it's a different environment now--that is clear, even from just monitoring results from afar.
ReplyDeleteAlso, in trying to dig around on this off and on this week during the state tournament, I ran across a great website of pictures on "Historic Schools of Warren County," and it reads ...
ReplyDeleteIn 1908, the Warren County Board of Education and the Trustees of the Bowling Green schools opened a high school to educate both the city and the county's public school students. New school law mandated that one or more first class high schools be established in each county. The law allowed the board to work with other school systems to satisfy this directive. The first high school opened at the Center Street School in Bowling Green with 18 county students enrolled. African Americans attended the State Street School. By 1911, four teachers instructed 116 high school students. Forty-five were county children. Two African American students from the county were enrolled at State Street which had a total of 27 pupils.
State law allowed three classes of high schools. First-class high schools provided a four-year course of instruction, second-class a three-year course and the third-class schools a two-year. In 1913, the county opened a new high school at Smiths Grove. By the 1932-33 school year, Warren County maintained nine first-class high schools, three second-class and two third-class schools. These schools typically housed grades 1-12.
I wonder if that's supposed to read "new state law" (instead of "new school law") at the start of the second sentence.
It really is mind-blowing to me to think of living in a place without public schools, and I know how limited that statement reveals my mind to be. Just how recent of an invention is the notion (or at least the realization) of public schools? And just how common/uncommon are they around the world even today? To me--born in Indiana in 1968 and growing up in small-town Kentucky--anything but some version of "you live here, so you go there (and it's pretty much the same experience as anywhere else)" feels like the historical anomaly.
ReplyDeleteOf course, there's so much incorrect in my sense of things. I do understand that.
ReplyDeleteStill, it's a captivating myth, and it certainly frames my first-blush rejection of the whole charter-school inevitability that is finally upon Kentucky. We've quit being political at the HP, and I'm not going to bash my governor or anyone else on this--I admit I'm ill-informed. But, man, it feels to me that we are turning our backs on a beautiful experiment rooted in the truth of nature/God's kingdom--that your kid is my kid and my kid is your kid and so we're going to all pitch in together to educate them equally and give them all a fighting chance. I know that charter-school advocates would argue their point in part in almost the same words, but I don't follow their logic to their solution. I think we should just invest all this energy and investment in the improvement that is already ongoing. I agree with this guy: "You not only enacted the Kentucky Education Reform Act but for 27 years, with both Democratic and Republican leadership putting children first, you have sustained its essential elements. That sort of stable bipartisan leadership is sadly rare. You have kept your eye on what’s important, the children, which has led to Kentucky’s track record of success."
ReplyDeleteBut, whatever sleepy old me thinks, charter schools are coming to Kentucky, and that feels like the start down an awful, slippery slope to no more pep buses and no more real sense of community and no more meaningful fun stuff like Sweet 16s. This must be what it feels like to Second Amendment folks every time some Snowflake like me wants to wonder about more gun control after somebody shoots up a bunch of people.
ReplyDelete