[grimsrud]

Is Ensworth some kind of prep school or something because I heard the announcers say they have only played varsity football for 7 yrs. This looked like a college team and they had tons of kids heading to play major college ball. A football program like this just doesnt develop to that level in only 7 yrs unless they are doing some type of recruiting.

Ensworth is a private school, and while the high school is less than ten years old, the school had (and still has) a K-8 for 45 years preceding the opening of the high school.

While Ensworth certainly could be deemed to be gaining an advantage through "recruiting", although I would think in theory no more or less than a LexCath or any other private school - Tennessee, Kentucky, or elsewhere - the main key to its success has been its coach, Ricky Bowers, and its feeder program. Bowers coached at MBA (a school that has been playing football since pre-1900) from 1994-2001 and went 81-17, including three straight titles from 1998-2000 and national rankings in two of those three years. He then left to start the Ensworth High School program in 2002. When the Trinity-MBA series started in 2003, MBA actually was starting a slight downturn, as Ensworth was a major feeder for MBA before the opening of the high school (and thus may partly explain Trinity's success, particularly last year, against MBA in more recent years, after going 1-3 against MBA from 2003-2006).

Trinity seems to be, on paper and on the field, the class of Kentucky again, at least based on what happened in the Highlands scrimmage and in the first two regular season games. While comparative scores can be taken with a grain of salt, there will at least be a proxy to compare Ensworth to Trinity as EHS plays both of Trinity's first two opponents, Brentwood Academy and MBA. Long story short, I feel fairly certain that, if form holds, LexCath will eventually realize that they played a team of Trinity-caliber tonight after Ensworth plays both Brentwood Academy and MBA. Ensworth's margin of victory over MBA last year (42 points) was similar to Trinity's MOV over MBA (45 points), and the EHS-MBA game could have been worse, but since Bowers was playing the school he not only coached at but also played at in the late 70s, he actually put on the brakes a bit on his alma mater.