[30 going on 40]

I hear what you are saying, people are too quick to throw the "recruiting" tag around without actually knowing what it means.

Since moving to Georgia it is a real eye opener. Parents will literally transplant their entire life to take their kids to a better school district or a school that gives them more advantages athletically. The amount of transfers on any given year, particularly at the 8th to 9th Grade level is staggering.

Even though it is not football, a fine example is Norcross High School. Norcross is a national basketball super-power. It is a public County school. Norcross has produced numerous D-1 players as well as NBA players and usually send 3-4 players to major D-1 schools every year. My GF teaches at one of the two middle schools that feed into Norcross. Typically, their basketball teams are among the very worst in all of Gwinnett County and completely non-competitive. What happens is every year parents of Freshman to be move specifically to the Norcross district. Typically, if you loo at the roster for Norcross HS you may be able to find 1, and at most, 2 players who actually attended a Norcross feeder school.

In metro areas, this is becoming more and more common when you have such a large number of school options in such a short distance from each other. Say a kid from Newport transfers to Highlands prior to his Freshman season along with two of his friends who live in the same community, and they played ball together all their life. The knee jerk reaction is to accuse them of being "recruited" when the simple fact of the matter is that Highlands did nothing to bring them on board except be a winning program with a ton of exposure.

As the poster above said, "Newport is going to be what it is...Standing on the edge of a cliff about to fall. " If I am a parent who's zip code "requires" me to send my kid to Newport, I am finding a way to send them elsewhere to a much more stable school and athletics department.

For those that don't know, Jodie Meeks was from Norcross.

Newport is a hole. It has refurbished its image, but many of those with the money on the east end send their kids elsewhere, if they have kids at all. Too many parents at Newport are absentee. You have a very strong minority of parents that are forced to do too much to support the school. It's just a bad situation from the outside looking in.