Only three years ago, the St. Frances Panthers were a laughingstock. They were from a tiny, under-resourced black Catholic high school in a bleak pocket of Baltimore. There was little money for coaches or uniforms or travel. Their MIAA rivals regularly beat them by double digits. In 2010, they lost every game. In 2015, they won only two.
That all changed with the arrival of Poggi, who had led the tony Gilman School — his alma mater and one of the MIAA's richest schools — to 13 league championships in 19 years. In addition to being a successful coach, Poggi is a wealthy businessman, and when he came to St. Frances, he brought his money with him — so far pouring $2.5 million into the football team and the school. In just three years, he has helped build a juggernaut of a program, with players receiving football scholarship offers from the likes of Clemson, Alabama and Oklahoma.
Along the way, his methods have alienated the rest of the league, raising questions of fairness and safety. To Poggi and his supporters, he's giving poor kids of color a chance at a good education and a college scholarship. To his critics, he's cheating the system in an ego-driven obsession to win. "People unfortunately in Baltimore think that success is a zero-sum game," Poggi told me. "And if you have it, they must not be getting it. You must be taking it from them. And that's not what it is at all
Beginning in 2016, the influx of Poggi's coaches and money made a nearly miraculous difference. In just the first year, the staff took the team's record to 10-2, and the Panthers won their first MIAA A Conference championship. Their roster swelled with Division I-caliber recruits, some from out of state. In 2017, with Poggi back to help lead the program, they went undefeated. The Panthers leveled all their opponents, outscoring them 534 to 61, and captured their second straight MIAA title.
The fallout started last May. Mount St. Joseph High School's letter came first, just after Memorial Day. The school would no longer play St. Frances in football because, officials charged, the two institutions did not share the goal of "a safe and healthy competitive environment." A day later, Calvert Hall followed suit, citing the "size and athletic disparity" between the teams. (Another school, Loyola Blakefield, had left the football conference five months earlier because of steep competition across the league.) Soon their remaining three rivals dropped them: The McDonogh School cited player safety; Archbishop Spalding and Gilman recommended that the Panthers form a national schedule without them.
Yet some read other motives into the rival schools' withdrawal. In Baltimore, the football debate became the subject of call-in radio shows and news stories. "No one had a problem when it was Gilman dominating the MIAA … back then it was a bunch of big white boys with a few brothas," someone wrote on Facebook, taking St. Frances's side. Another countered in support of the boycotters: "I don't blame 'em. St. Frances recruits grown men to play against kids." References to the players' "size" and jabs about their being "grown men" sounded racially coded to the supporters of St. Frances, whose team, like the school, is nearly all black.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...play-it/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.75c4f969a90d
Interesting article. I'd recommend reading the whole thing for sure
