Poorly worded...I don't think Gretna has a stud on offense nor do I think they have a rock solid defense
Scary Teams
- Thread starter intrinsicreward
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I completely disagree with this. State championships are 40% coaching, 30% community support, and 30% talent.
Michael Vick and Marcus Vick were some of the greatest talents to come out of VHSL. The number of state championship appearances for Ferguson and Warwick while the Vicks were there? Zero. They never even got close to state. That kind of talent surely has a huge impact when you're talking about 1A/2A ball, but I don't recall Honaker winning a championship when they had Heath Miller.
I believe honaker won that year...u do remember him pretty much single handily beating us with several qb scrambles
First I would say that the community support comes into play only after a team is actually winning so I discount that as needing to be there. People are fair weather fans until a team proves itself a winner and a contender. Look at the drop of attendance when it gets cold and the team is losing. Put a winning/contending team out there and the people show up in droves.
State Championship teams are born in the off season and more often than not over several seasons (Auburn/Lord Botetourt come to mind as being in the process of developing into contenders) maybe even over a decade (Glenvar comes to mind) as one team stands on the shoulders of the one before it. Salem won multiple state championships without "talented" players. Until this year Coach Magenbauer had never coached a player that had been offered a D1 scholarship and Willis White only had a few over many years. So I discount talent as being 30% in high school. I've seen first hand the extremely hard working Salem players especially during the heat of the summer when no one is looking. Those teams beat many teams with much more talent over the years.
I would say at the HS level it's 25% vision and 75% hard work. You can call that coaching or you call that developed talent. It begins with the players believing the vision enough to put in the hard work. Simple formula. If you have both of those then other resources just make it easier to load and reload. (Giles/Salem come to mind) and the formula for the success is already in place. "If you build it, they will come" is true in many different ways.
"Vision without work is dreamery.
Work without vision is drudgery.
Work with vision is destiny."
Ezra Taft Benson
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As for Community Support , the poster above is 100% correct on fair weather fans. Who ever gets to Salem will have fans there that have not been to a game all season. EVERY team has fair weather fans, some more than others.
Vic Hall could beat Richlands and Union
and defeated zeus all by himself.....
I saw Gretna one time early in the year. They definitely had some athletes but the pieces were not fitting together very well. Sounds like thy are putting things together at the end.
Vic Hall was pretty unbelievable. I saw him play against Poquoson in the state championship. 'Quoson had a very talented and uncharacteristically fast team that year with Canella and Fiedler. I believe Poquoson's greatest player of all time Josh Zidenberg was on that team as well. But they had never seen speed like Vic. He absolutely did whatever he wanted to do against Poquoson's defense, on the ground and through the air. Poquoson had to respect his ability to run and then got torched in the secondary. The linebackers were simply paralyzed by indecision.Vic Hall could beat Richlands and Union
The year that Honaker played KW in the state championship was 2000. Honaker was twice the size of KW. But they couldn't stop the speed of KW on offense or defense. Honaker scored first but didn't score again until late in the 4th. Miller was probably sacked 6 or 7 times that game and KW held the big rb Neil Sample in check too. Honestly that year I thought the two best teams were KW and New Kent as they played in the regional championship and to this day is the best defensive game I ever saw. KW capitalized off of a NK turnover deep in NK territory on the first drive and scored to go up 6-0 and neither team really threatened again the rest of the game. KW would go onto beat Buffalo Gap 44-0 the following week and then Honaker. Still say Honaker wasn't ready for the speed of KW as they probably hadn't c played a team like that all year. Miller was still impressive. Knew he'd do great things in college but never envisioned he'd turn out to have such a great NFL career. But even then he was a class act in all the post game activities.
