About as truly mundane and pointless as it gets here, folks, but I wanted to share the news about our newly minted varsity football program for home educated boys in the New Orleans area, The Home School Saints:
We’re part of a growing movementto provide sports for home schooled children, as one of the trade-offs in doing the teaching yourself is that most rec league sports don’t continue past the age of 14 and most schools don’t want to hassle with letting home educated kids onto their teams. As such, teams and leagues are forming on their own.
Many of the boys on our team have never played football before, and it’s been fun to watch their hard work and dedication pay off in much better play over the course of the season. That of course is code-speak for we-haven’t-won-any-games-yet.
Our hope is to grow our program into a league and also expand to include sports for girls as well as winter and spring sports too. Mundane, pointless, shared. Thanks for reading.
Contrapuntal largely nailed it. While we do pay our share of taxes to support public schools, and while many states technically allow home educated youth to play for their public school, it’s often done at the discretion of the individual school administrators and they generally don’t like to make exceptions to standard policy. Also, from a teenager’s point of view, you’re already the odd kid for home schooling; playing on the public school team would be even odder.
An exception to that has been Tim Tebow, a home schooler who played for his public school team. Of course, when you’re the best quarterback the team’s ever had, most awkwardness and bureaucratic hand-wringing gets pushed aside in favor of winning games. Several state legislatures are weighing a “Tim Tebow Law” to allow more of that to happen.
That’s what’s going on in my home state of Louisiana. However, state-wide we have 8,000 home educated youth. The percentage of kids who would take advantage of such opportunities is probably pretty low. That’s why the self-started teams are picking up steam.
Wouldn"t it be crazy if way down the road these homeschooled teams become de facto all-star teams? I remember hearing about alleged scandals involving high-profile high school athletes transferring schools under fishy circumstances - someone rents a trailer in the new school’s district that becomes the star athlete’s new home address - in an effort to get into a better program. With college on the line, these were fairly high stakes. I played high school football at a private school that offered scholarships - it just paid for the good players. As anyone who’s watched highschool football can tell you, talent at that level is so disparate, even at the nationally renowned programs. Could home schooled programs be a cheaper way to the next Lowndes Co. or De La Salle?
WAY down the road maybe. Given our talent level at the moment and the talent pool - - 2,500 kids in the metro area - - it’ll be a very long time. Our league is setting up rules that a boy has to have been home schooled the year previous to the year he plays and has to show proof that he’s in a state-registered home school program.
I really don’t think so. A team of home schoolers is not going to have access to the level of training and coaching available to the public or private school teams. Even high school teams back in the day had a coaching staff, including coaches assigned to go scout future opponents, review game films, etc. With a volunteer coaching staff, I don’t think enough resources can be provided to field a competitive team at the state championship level.
Good luck to your team! Sounds like a fun program for the kids to be involved in.
Our state has a law that requires home schooled students be allowed in however many programs and classes they wish and every district in the area abides by it. I have a friend whose daughter was in band. She showed up for class and went home at the end. I know there are a few home schooled kids on teams all around our area. We have a lot of home schooling families around here so it’s nice to see the state laws support them and let the kids participate in athletics and classes as needed. I’m sorry your state isn’t so accommodating (yet.)
As much fun as the boys are having playing the sport, they seem more to enjoy the comraderie of practice and games. Just doing normal guy stuff. That puts in sharp relief that we don’t have the same outlet for the ‘gals’, so we’re addressing that at our next parents meeting in October.
