[charlie22]

Highlands usually has decent speed, but more importantly, they have all of the things i listed to a T. Thats why they win. Im not disagreeing with your post. However, you can bring in some of the best speed coaches in the world and your not going to make Billy Bob run any faster. He wasn't shown that a young age and knew what to work on his whole way threw school like you are with Highlands, (see my number 1) and you cant expect to win by taking frosh kids and have them just start learning different things to do.

The biggest problem with EKY schools is that the game has passed a lot of these coached up. Two many still believe you can run the ball 9 out of 10 plays and expect defenses to not know what your doing and then have your defense set up to stop the run. It just doesnt work like that.
Highlands IMO should be the model school when looking at developing players. Its obvious Highlands wins without all the talent some years by doing the things i listed.

Thanks for saying the nice things about Highlands and I agree with a lot of things you stated. But I disagree with you about not being able to develop or improve speed (and quickness, which is more important than true speed in my opinion particularly for linemen, whom more than the "skilled players" determine the outcome of almost every game). Take a 300 pound O lineman who spends a whole lot of time working on his bench press, cleans and squats, and have him lose 50 pounds by spending more time running and working on footwork drills, and he will become faster and quicker than he was. I'd call that developing and improving the kid's speed.

sstack is right on point about how a whole lot of Highlands kids changed from chubby, slow frosh to fast, quick juniors and seniors. My oldest son was one of those Highlands players (I'm not from eastern Kentucky). I've probably mentioned this before, but as a sophomore, he was a slow, heavy O linemen. But as a result of him completely buying into Highlands off season conditioning (and working out with a former NFL buddy of mine on the "off" days), he lost a whole lot of fat and weight, got in great shape and he became much quicker AND faster than he was when he was heavy. He changed from a kid that the Highlands coaches never thought would be a varsity player for Highlands (and yes they told me that) to a starter on the O line his junior year. He became very fast and quick for an O lineman and was able to block and maintain blocks on fast Lbers. In his second varsity start, he had an outstanding game blocking an African American LBer for Colerain that received a scholarship to a Big 10 school. My son is a Caucasian by the way. His transformation was not an aberration, as I've seen many, many Highlands kids do the same thing he did. I'll agree that a lot of the other factors you mentioned played a huge role in the dedication it took for him to transform his body.

The point I'm attempting to make is that the lack of success of eastern Ky schools in winning state championships has little to nothing to do with the lack of African American athletes in eastern Kentucky. It does have a lot to do with the style of play of a lot of eastern Ky schools and the type of off season conditioning and lifting being done to foster that style of play.