RebRaider85

I did not see anyone from South get ejected. If anyone deserved to get ejected it was Gate City #10 who tackled the South RB about 2 yards out of bounds and drove him all the way into the fence. If he had hit the fence at the pole it could have broken his neck. One of the worst cheap shots I’ve seen in a long time.

South has only lost to TN 5A schools Daniel Boone (when they had Charlie Cole) and undefeated Cherokee (32-30). South is a much better team than most on this board have been giving them credit for.

East #8 was transported from the sideline back to the field house in the back of a JD Gator vehicle with about a minute left in the game. I was sitting in the stands right above where he was laying prone on the sideline for a few minutes. He had to be lifted into the back of the vehicle and from his face it appeared he was in some serious pain, enough to prompt prayer from this old man! Just posting the roster on here or making a Facebook page with it as one of the posts would be fine. Nothing fancy required. Congrats to those who pull this game together. You do a great job and I look forward to it every year.

This was a really good football game. Wish there had been a roster published somewhere as that would have made it more enjoyable. I could not find a roster anywhere. Does anyone know what happened to the East team #8 QB at the end of the game? I really hate seeing a kid get injured in an end of the year game like that. I was freezing by then and maybe I missed something but I really didn't understand how the end of the game was played out with each team getting the ball seemingly out of turn a couple times and the clock not even running part of the time. E&H was a great facility for this game. Looking forward to next year.

How early are you recommending? If I go I'll be leaving from Kingsport, TN on that Saturday.

I told you GC had a shot at this. Final SS 41 - GC 37 with GC receiver getting tackled on 4th down at the 1 yard line with time expiring. Reminded me of my favorite game in this series when GC won 31-28 with South runner getting tackled inside the 5 near the end of the game. That was GC's last state championship season I think.

what is the split in the series?

Well just heard that one of our best LB's is injured. GC definitely has a shot in this game. This is the weakest Rebel team in maybe 10 or more years.

Ok, no topic on this by GC fans in first 2 pages - didn't look any further. This is your year to get your 2nd win against the Rebels. They are having a very difficult season so far and I'm predicting that they will be 0-5 before playing Central later in the year. If you've got a passing game you'll be in good shape. Rebels can play pretty stout against the run this year though. What are the Blue Devils bringing to Death Valley this year?

We probably did run into each other. I married a GC girl.

Yep I was there. Maybe I just got along with people better.

Were you there? You gotta be kidding. Lynn View and Ketron were rivals in some ways but the sports that were most competitive pre-consolidation were the ones that gelled the quickest. Fantastic basketball teams right out of the gate, state title baseball teams within 2 or 3 years, football was middlin but unfortunately the good football coach got the AD job and the other one just never did much. The Lynn Garden and Bloomingdale communities were too much alike to support an us vs them feud.

The first choice being Norris from North or are you referring to someone else?

If you have to ground and pound game plan taking a long time to score each time and circumstances occur that result in you getting a couple scores down on the scoreboard then I think it is a pretty fair blanket statement to say that your ability to recover from that scenario is much more limited compared to a quick-strike type of team when time is running out in the 3rd and 4th quarters.

Back in the 60's and 70's there were plenty of NETN teams playing SWVA teams. In 1979 or so was when all the school consolidation happened in NETN and those new schools with populations of 1500+ were really too big to be scheduling Powell Valley/Appy/GC. During that time most of the NETN schools were in the Big 10 conference and therefore only had one non-conference game each year so there wasn't even much flexibility in scheduling. In 1991 Kingsport annexed half of Norths territory so it got cut down to about 700 real quick and started scheduling teams in SWVA regularly. South didn't start playing GC until Souths population started dropping too. They will probably be between 700 to 800 students over the next couple years.I'll be seeing a lot of SWVA games this year. Will be trying to make several trips to Union to see a kid I go to church with play his Senior year.

That ground/pound stuff doesn't work too well against a spread team that can quick-strike on you. Look at Gate City - Sullivan South since they started playing 8 or 9 years ago. GC only won 1 time 31-28 during their last state championship run. One of the best football games I've ever seen. That would have been another loss however if not for a South fumble around the GC 4 yard line with a couple min to go.

If the geographic boundaries established for the championships attributed to SWVA were equally applied to NETN you would have have a lot more state champs on the TN side. You'd definitely have to include Jefferson County, Morristown, etc. Maybe even down to Sevier County. Also remember that the NETN schools have to get through Alcoa, Maryville, Knox Fulton and the like to even get to a state championship game.

The first group of schools you mention are able to recruit actively and offer scholarships. The second group of TN private schools cannot recruit nor offer scholarships other than a small discount that the catholic schools give to catholic families. They are still out 10 to 15k per year for tuition. As I said before this second group must play in a classification at 1.8 times their actual student count if they participate in the playoffs.

Wow. These are really nice.

That never helped in the FCA All Star game. Don't have time now to discuss. Will get back to this later.

I agree about the private school equation and will post some additional thoughts on here later but I do have to correct one thing - Riverdale is huge (just like Science Hill) but they are a public school in the Rutherford county school system. The biggest privates in TN are only about 500 to 700 students and they make non-scholarship private schools play in classifications at 1.8 times their actual enrollment. There is not a private school in TN big enough to play in Science Hills class even with the 1.8 multiplier.

To answer a few questions raised... The North school itself has actually been in the city limits since the school was first opened in 1980 but the students themselves were county residents. Kingsport has annexed about 1/2 of the former North territory and maybe about 1/3 of the former South territory. They won't be annexing any more of Bloomingdale. They got what they wanted from that area years ago. The North folks shot themselves in the foot as the first proposal was to send the North kids to South just across town. They raised a huge fuss and so a long term study was done which took into account ALL county school buildings and the end result was a conclusion that two high schools (essentially West/East) was the way to go. The Airport location is actually the geographic center of the student population for the West school. This was all driven by Kingsports annexation since the early 1990's. When this decision was made is when the Gate City talk started. I have a friend with kids at Yuma Elementary and he said he would not be surprised if that school didn't have 30-40% Tennessee kids coming from Hawkins county which is very close. I think the HC elementary school for that area is further away. I didn't think space would be a problem for GC as my family over there has talked about how many less students there are there now compared to 30 years ago.

OK, this is a slow season for conversation so I thought I'd throw something out that I've been wondering about. Sullivan County TN is planning a new high school located near Tri-Cities Airort that will replace Sullivan North, Sullivan South, and a significant portion of the Sullivan Central population. This location is not too bad for most of the South and Central residents but it is FAR from Bloomingdale which is where most of the North population comes from. Lots of the North families are talking about sending their kids to Gate City. Could be 100 to 200 kids even if people really get up in arms. Now this has been going on to a small degree even since I was in school in the 80's but I was wondering if a large influx like that would raise eyebrows. From what I understand, TN residents are generally allowed to attend free of charge because it increases the headcount which means more money from the state. This would not happen till 2019.

Huh? I honestly don't have a clue as to what you are talking about. All I can tell you is that in TN each student in a county is counted and a given amount of money is transferred to the county from the state for that amount of students. The county sets a tax rate that adds any local school spending on top of that and if there are any cities in the county that run their own school system then those systems get their portion of the county total according to the fraction of the students attending those independent city systems. Then the cities have their own taxing authority so they add whatever they want on top of the state/county funding that they have received. That is what I was conveying about the city schools having extra resources. In regards to football, the county mowed the field occasionally and painted it maybe once per year. We had parents conditioning the field, touching up the paint weekly, etc. All the nice stuff was funded by parent fund raising and volunteer labor. It was very apparent if you looked at our facilities then drove 10 miles and looked at another county facility (similar sized) that had the same government funding and demographics but less parental support.