To the ancient Greeks, Paideia (παιδεία) was "the process of educating man into his true form, the real and genuine human nature." (1) It also means culture. It is the ideal in which the Hellenes formed the world around them and their youth.The Paideia School is a neat private school system that started out as a small school wanting to challenge kids differently than they had been, by introducing new creative and intellectual challenges they hadn't seen elsewhere. The school later began to consume the neighboring housing and converted it to classrooms, as well as constructed their own new classroom buildings, which makes for a very eclectic campus environment.
For the first time in team history, the team lost every game of a tournament, going 0-5. I was thoroughly surprised by what I saw from the other high school teams, with the exception of us and Paideia, the other teams strictly played a field position game. I'm not sure if it was a conscious strategy decision by them or not, but the teams would just huck, huck, and huck. I had never seen a high school team huck as much as our first opponent, Columbia, did. At least not until our second opponent, North Hills. And then, our first game on Sunday against University School of Nashville (Grassburn) was almost comical. If they caught a D near their own endzone, they would at times literally just wind up like a pull and throw it to no one. I'd never played in a game like that before.
Actually, that's not true. It's close to the exact strategy I used to lead my team to back-to-back TCUL championships.
There's only 2 ways to overcome the field position strategy: one, execute the exact same strategy (only better); or two, play a solid possession game. In the windy, rainy, cold condition, possession just wasn't an option. We had to resort to playing the field position game in the Grassburn game, too, only we didn't execute it well at all. By the end of the game, Grassburn had scored 7 of their goals with a combined yardage of 0 yards on those scoring drives.
I'm looking forward to college regionals in a couple weeks to see if this strategy is being utilized more in the college division, too, since the level of turnovers for most college teams is high enough that it would be a very effective strategy. Maybe I can even talk Becky into convincing his team to do it at sectionals as an experiment. I can't imagine that the 6th best team in the Northwoods wouldn't succumb to a field position game (if executed properly).
Speaking of, my predictions for the Northwoods qualifiers are, in order, Carleton, Minnesota, Winona, Olaf, GOP, and St. Cloud.
Go lucky dogs!
