The Cost Of Being Bosco

Today's Record has an interesting story on Don Bosco's nationally recognized football success. Its basic thrust, however, reeks more of aggressive boosterism than of sober analysis of Don Bosco's curious (to say the least) status in the world of high school sports on a genuinely national level.

While the story notes, for example, that promoters often pick up most of the costs for Bosco's highly publicized out-of-state trips for games (which sometimes even are nationally  televised via the greedy maws of ESPN's seemingly hungry-for-anything, ESPN2), it never raises the corollary question of whether the word "promoters" should ever even be mentioned within the context of high school (HIGH SCHOOL!) sports.

There are no quotes in the story from actual student-athletes who in fact play football at Bosco. Nary a one, too, from any actual administrators at Bosco. And the latter seems a weird omission even if one accepts the idea that head Bosco coach Toal is uncommonly protective of his players.

Most curiously to me, the story, while it remarks upon Bosco's attraction to college athletic recruiters and the assorted other bottom feeders who populate our current system, never mentions the supposedly most important thing of all about high school, its role as due preparation for either college or the larger world beyond. There isn't even a mention of Bosco's graduation rate for its jocks, the very statistic that generally so fascinates the most vociferous critics of collegiate sports. But then, the world of state-regulated "parochial" sports (to use the old term) is so strangely administered that most Catholic and other private schools don't even commonly play each other until the playoffs (if in fact they make them).

Still, Bosco's program seems to be "working" in a sense. Just a cursory examination of the rosters for such area institutions of higher learning as Fordham, Marist and SUNY Albany over the last few years shows several players (though not so much, I noted, as actual starters.) from Bosco. So there you have it: you may well get a college scholarship for football if you play for Don Bosco. It just may not be to, say, an academic powerhouse like Harvard or Yale  (which I once foolishly believed was the reason one attended a pricey place like Bosco in the first place as opposed to "lesser" NJ Catholic high schools like St. Mary's and Queen of Peace) and it may only result in second or third-string status on your college team. But, by golly, you got there via Don Bosco. I really do await a more detailed investigation by the Record as to whether it's then worth it. However "national" Bosco's football program seems to be.

The football rosters of Ivy League schools, after all, are stuffed full of graduates from assorted small town and regional public high schools, albeit ones without the national reputation of Don Bosco.