2 hours ago, TyroneBigsby said:

I fully expect any private school to have kids from outside the neighborhood. It just feels like it’s been taken to another level entirely when the starting 5 all live in another state. I have been lead to believe this is becoming the norm in football as well. Maybe I’m just living in the past. 

How many CovCath football players do you think live in Ohio?

Football hasn't changed. The Covington Catholic faithful don't feel there's a disconnect with the direction the football program is going. It's going in a great direction.

The basketball program has changed. There are some people within the basketball crowd at CCH that gripe about it for sure. At this point most of those folks' kids have made their way into other schools. It is what it is. Over the years I've found many or even most basketball parents to be tempestuous at best, and the degree to which the AAU circuit drives the game on many levels has only made that worse. So I guess I'm not phased when I hear basketball parents who are griping.

This thread made me laugh though. Highlands fans and CCH fans love to try to magnify perceived issues at each others schools. Or make them up completely.

2 minutes ago, The Oracle said:

Football hasn't changed. The Covington Catholic faithful don't feel there's a disconnect with the direction the football program is going. It's going in a great direction.

The basketball program has changed. There are some people within the basketball crowd at CCH that gripe about it for sure. At this point most of those folks' kids have made their way into other schools. It is what it is. Over the years I've found that many or even most basketball parents to be tempestuous at best, and the degree to which the AAU circuit drives the game on many levels has only made that worse. So I guess I'm not phased when I hear basketball parents who are griping.

This thread made me laugh though. Highlands fans and CCH fans love to try to magnify perceived issues at each others schools. Or make them up completely.

Tempestuous - Characterized by strong and turbulent or conflicting emotion. Very stormy.

From the Great Google Machine. ?

9 minutes ago, theguru said:

Tempestuous - Characterized by strong and turbulent or conflicting emotion. Very stormy.

From the Great Google Machine. ?

Sister Effie was a slave driver when it came to vocab tests.

Just now, The Oracle said:

Sister Effie was a slave driver when it came to vocab tests.

Sister Effie worked you very hard. 

23 minutes ago, colonel-fan said:

How many CovCath football players do you think live in Ohio?

Hell I have no idea. I’d love to see a map of where the players live now, vs 20 years ago tho. 

Everyone, the violations are piling up in this thread:

8. Any attempt to use or suggest profanity is prohibited. This means you may not use symbols to replace some or all of the letters in a word that might otherwise be blocked by the BGP word filter. Any attempt to circumvent the word filter with general abbreviations or text message abbreviations will also be considered a violation under this rule.

10. No gambling, bookmaking or point spread comments are allowed in any of the high school forums. Figures of speech that use gambling terms may not be used in any of the high school forums. All gambling comments are permitted in the non-high school forums as long as they do not involve any high school sports, students, or student-athletes.

Well, when they had the neighborhood kids in there and were mediocre, that wasn't good enough either.   So pick a side and be happy.

3 minutes ago, The Raven said:

Well, when they had the neighborhood kids in there and were mediocre, that wasn't good enough either.   So pick a side and be happy.

I remember them being extremely competitive, great even, in the 90s. 

3 minutes ago, TyroneBigsby said:

Hell I have no idea. I’d love to see a map of where the players live now, vs 20 years ago tho. 

I was there in the 90s. I would say that probably 3 out of 5 of the guys I graduated with came from St. Agnes, Blessed Sacrament, St. Joe's (Crescent Springs), and St. Pius X. There were a couple from Ludlow, a couple from Covington, a couple from Erlanger/Elsmere, one from Verona, and the majority of the rest were from Hebron, Union, and Florence.

Just looked through my dad's senior yearbook, which lists "home parishes" for the class of 1966. They had 16 out of 173 kids coming from non-feeder schools.

I did think it was funny a handful of months ago when I was talking to one of my buddies who grew up in St. Pius X parish and he made a comment about "kids at Cov Cath from non-traditional feeder schools," and I set him aback when I pointed out that he came from a school that was at one point a non-traditional feeder school. The original feeder parishes at Cov Cath were St. Agnes, St. Aloysius, St. Ann, St. Augustine, St. Benedict, Blessed Sacrament, St. Boniface, St. James, St. John, St. Joseph (Covington), St. Mary’s Cathedral, Mother of God, and St. Patrick. It wasn't until the early 60s that St. Pius X and St. Joe's Crescent Springs were added in as feeder parishes to Cov Cath.

2 minutes ago, Colonels_Wear_Blue said:

I was there in the 90s. I would say that probably 3 out of 5 of the guys I graduated with came from St. Agnes, Blessed Sacrament, St. Joe's (Crescent Springs), and St. Pius X. There were a couple from Ludlow, a couple from Covington, a couple from Erlanger/Elsmere, one from Verona, and the majority of the rest were from Hebron, Union, and Florence.

Just looked through my dad's senior yearbook, which lists "home parishes" for the class of 1966. They had 16 out of 173 kids coming from non-feeder schools.

I did think it was funny a handful of months ago when I was talking to one of my buddies who grew up in St. Pius X parish and he made a comment about "kids at Cov Cath from non-traditional feeder schools," and I set him aback when I pointed out that he came from a school that was at one point a non-traditional feeder school. The original feeder parishes at Cov Cath were St. Agnes, St. Aloysius, St. Ann, St. Augustine, St. Benedict, Blessed Sacrament, St. Boniface, St. James, St. John, St. Joseph (Covington), St. Mary’s Cathedral, Mother of God, and St. Patrick. It wasn't until the early 60s that St. Pius X and St. Joe's Crescent Springs were added in as feeder parishes to Cov Cath.

He "picked a fight" with the wrong Colonel. ?

4 minutes ago, theguru said:

He "picked a fight" with the wrong Colonel. ?

#NeverGraduate

34 minutes ago, Colonels_Wear_Blue said:

I was there in the 90s. I would say that probably 3 out of 5 of the guys I graduated with came from St. Agnes, Blessed Sacrament, St. Joe's (Crescent Springs), and St. Pius X. There were a couple from Ludlow, a couple from Covington, a couple from Erlanger/Elsmere, one from Verona, and the majority of the rest were from Hebron, Union, and Florence.

Just looked through my dad's senior yearbook, which lists "home parishes" for the class of 1966. They had 16 out of 173 kids coming from non-feeder schools.

I did think it was funny a handful of months ago when I was talking to one of my buddies who grew up in St. Pius X parish and he made a comment about "kids at Cov Cath from non-traditional feeder schools," and I set him aback when I pointed out that he came from a school that was at one point a non-traditional feeder school. The original feeder parishes at Cov Cath were St. Agnes, St. Aloysius, St. Ann, St. Augustine, St. Benedict, Blessed Sacrament, St. Boniface, St. James, St. John, St. Joseph (Covington), St. Mary’s Cathedral, Mother of God, and St. Patrick. It wasn't until the early 60s that St. Pius X and St. Joe's Crescent Springs were added in as feeder parishes to Cov Cath.

Sounds about like what I would expect. Are we saying that this is still the case or no?  As it relates to the football team. 

At this point, I would probably guess the student body at Cov Cath is probably close to a 50/50 split of kids from St. Agnes, Blessed Sacrament, St. Joe's and St. Pius....and then "all the rest".

There are several things at play there, though. Way back when, when the Catholic schools had clergy and religious teaching classes, tuitions were largely "built in" to each parish's budget. Parishes without their own parish school had a school that their students were assigned to attend by the diocese in the case where the parents wanted them in Catholic schools, and in those cases, the parish's funds were moved around accordingly. Similarly, there were feeder parishes for high schools, and funds from those feeder parishes went towards the high schools they fed into. That's why the feeder system was such an established "thing."

With the reduced number of clergy and religious teaching in classrooms these days, along with the demand for smaller teacher-to-student ratios, that has made the cost of running a Catholic school increase exponentially, and that has turned into higher tuitions. Back in the 60's, Cov Cath cost something like $280 a year for feeder school students. When I was there in the '90s I believe it was hovering around $2400 for kids from feeder parishes, and $2900 for non-district students (aka, non-feeder). One of the first things Bishop Foys established after being installed was to do away with the feeder system. His philosophy was that if any student from a Catholic parish in the diocese wanted to attend any Catholic school in the diocese, then he was not going to place any additional financial burden on anyone simply because they wanted to go to a Catholic school that was different from the one they were geographically nearest to. That meant the only non-district students at Cov Cath were now the kids who were not members of Catholic parishes in NKY.

With costs of Catholic schools being what they are now - parents of incoming freshman at Cov Cath are paying roundabout $10K in tuition and fees now - a lot of parents are opting to only pay for a portion of their kids' educations in private schools. So they either start their kids in public schools and then switch them to Catholic schools for high school, or vice versa. That means a lot of kids who end up at Cov Cath have not previously been in Catholic schools.

The other thing that has happened is that the sprawl into Boone County and Independence has greatly impacted where the Catholic families live. St. Tim's parish in Union is swelling (I believe that they are planning an expansion of their parish school already). St. Cecelia in Independence has a larger student body as well. If you look at a map, there just aren't Catholic high schools in those areas. I can name more than one person I know whose explanation for their son attending Cov Cath or their daughter attending Notre Dame is because "We wanted to send Johnny to Catholic high school. I drive from Union to Cincinnati for work every morning. If I'm gonna go ahead and pay Catholic school tuition, I'm paying to send them to the school that's the easiest to hop off of I-75 and then hop back on while I'm heading into work."



Diocese Of Covington northern Kentucky elementary schools:






Diocese of Covington northern Kentucky high schools:

49 minutes ago, TyroneBigsby said:

Sounds about like what I would expect. Are we saying that this is still the case or no?  As it relates to the football team. 

If we're talking specifically football, then I would say that the football and basketball teams both have always had a different ratio of feeder-to-non-feeder* than the rest of the student body. Just looking at football (which is more my wheelhouse), there has always been a good portion of the players who came from outside the traditional feeder* schools. I would guess the guys from my class at Cov Cath who I played football with....50% of them, max, came from the traditional feeders. I would guess that's still relatively close to that. But we had football starters from my class who played Pee Wee football for the Newport Firefighters, Erlanger Lions, Campbell County Red Devils, Dixie Raiders, Fort Mitchell Spartans, Fort Wright Bengal Tigers, and quite a few more who came up in the BCPWFL.

It's not out of the ordinary to have people at other schools wailing and moaning about where Cov Cath's students and athletes come from either. The first 5 or 6 years Cov Cath fielded a football team, there was an unofficial boycott of scheduling the Colonels by most of the football coaches around NKY. The only Northern Kentucky teams that were willing to play Cov Cath in their first 5 seasons (aside from New Cath, who was required to do so by the diocese) were Newport, Boone County and Highlands.


* The feeder system hasn't even existed for almost of two decades. It was done away with by Bishop Foys circa 2004.