Reply to Landon and Bullis -- schools that are evolving?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NCS beat Bullis girls in lacrosse this year, Bullis' first year in the lower division.  I have a young daughter who goes to a K-8 and loves lax. She wants to go to a highschool with at least a decent team.  Bullis seems to be decreasing its strength in the girl sports.  [/quote]

So Bullis lost a girls lacrosse game to NCS, so that means Bullis is "decreasing its strength in the girls sports".  LOL.[/quote]

Read more carefully, PP.  Bullis dropped down from the top level teams (A division) to the second tier and then, in their first year in B division lost to NCS,which BTW, is not known for its lax teams at all.  So, the next payer clarified they lost the tournament, not the regular season but, they still lost to NCS AND they still dropped down to the B Division, all in the same year.  That is bad for Bullis.[/quote]

The ISL has two leagues in most sports (it only has one league in field hockey, in which some of the ISL league teams don't play that sport).  It is done like the English premier league "relegation" system.  If you finish at the bottom of the AA (top division), you go down to the A (second) division.  The top team from the A division goes up to the top division.  For many years, including this year, the formal league championship in every sport, and the relegation teams, were determined ONLY by the regular season.  Starting next year, if you win the post-season tournament you will be considered a co-champion of the league even if you did not win the regular season.  (I haven't heard how they are handling relegation if a different team wins the tournament and the regular season.)

I've had a number of kids playing lacrosse in this area over the past decade.  While Visitation and Saint Stephens Saint Agnes have remained at the top of the heap throughout that time, otherwise there has been movement in the AA division.  Bullis, Episcopal, Holton-Arms, NCS, Stone Ridge, Potomac, and Holy Child are all teams that have been in both the AA and A division during that time period (I believe there are eight schools in the AA division).   The two teams that have stayed up at the top both have structural advantages.  The Saints have recruited for lacrosse long before other schools did (most girls schools don't), and had a club team in Alexandria that was used as a farm team.  They have also had terrific, visionary coaching -- no disrespect to them.  Visitation has by far the most Upper School girls (500) in the league -- even other all-girls school have considerably less (e.g. NCS with 280-300 or so).  They also start at 9th grade so students' athletic abilities are known by then in terms of giving credit for athletic excellence in admissions.

From my recollection, this is the first year Bullis has been relegated to the A division, and they won it in their first year and moved right back up.  So I would not see any sign of structural weakness in their program there.  In addition, I believe they have two players currently playing for University of Maryland, which both shows the strength of their program and suggests that they may have a younger, less experienced team at present.  Finally, NCS has always had a very solid lacrosse program, at least for the past several decades.  NCS won the overall "strongest sports program" across all sports ISL award in 2009, and benefits, as do all the girls' schools, from generally having a deeper pool of potential athletes (at least numerically) than co-ed schools like Potomac, Bullis, Sidwell.

This is more detail than people want to read, but as a former college athlete and current parent of active kids, I am frustrated by how quickly parents jump to conclusions about the health of an athletic program (or lack thereof) from one or two years' worth of results.  At the risk of being preachy, I would also say that the most important thing is whether the relevant coach is knowledgeable, effective, and positive -- all traits that everyone in the league would ascribe to the Bullis coach.  [/quote]

Sidwell is another school that has been in both the AA and the A division in lacrosse within the past decade (including the past five years).  There's lots of movement, by design, other than the powerhouse programs of SSSAS and Georgetown Visitation.[/quote]

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