Stang5280 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 1:35 pm
While we’re debating whether anyone in the section can compete with Andover going forward, this seems like an appropriate place to drop in a link to Karl’s postmortem dissection of East’s season:
https://apatientcycle.com/2021/03/18/incomplete/
With all due respect, I don’t necessarily share his optimism about the young core. Granted, I didn’t watch many East games, but I also didn’t see much star power in that group. The talent pipeline seems to be slowly drying up, which is concerning. Hopefully I am wrong, but there is a lot of work to be done to become competitive again in the section, much less at the state level.
The current sophomore and freshman classes were both top 10ish as PeeWees, which is equal to or better than what any current 7AA member can say. (Bantam results for East are not useful since they pull kids up to HS so often.) Obviously a lot can change between PeeWees and high school, but that's a decent base to build from and historically they've lost less of any great importance to private schools than some of the other top 10 programs. And when East teams are drilling Randolph systems, they have a habit of looking awful until things start clicking into place. But Christian, Winkler, Spenningsby, and Peterson plus 2-3 of the current bantams make a strong core on paper if they stick around and progress. I'm not saying they're Worth/LaMaster/Donovan or Randloph/Olson/Toninato-level teams, but certainly capable of being on par with many of the teams between those groups that still went to State regularly or lost thrillers to elite Rapids teams. Looking at the current youth teams' results, they're a bit lower but still plenty competitive with all but the very top teams in the state, including Andover.
On paper, I'd expect a three-horse race between 1) Andover 2) East and 3) Rapids over the next few years in 7AA. What has changed is that Andover has caught up depth-wise; that pretty much has always been an advantage East enjoys in this section that may no longer be true. Longer-term the question is whether Andover can sustain this success or if it's one of those outer-ring suburbs that rises up for a bit but then goes back down as the newer development moves on. As far as I know East's youth numbers are pretty stable, and income levels are not dropping on the east side. (If anything, they're growing at a faster rate than in the recent past.) The base of the pyramid looks pretty sound.
That doesn't guarantee success. Marshall could start picking up more kids (as they have periodically in the past, like in the late 60s and the 00s) or internal strife could tear things down. It's not crazy to imagine a future for the east side of Duluth that looks something like southwest and far south Minneapolis: some lovely pockets of a city that has some significant challenges in other parts, and not bursting with young hockey-playing families, with significant private school attendance. But I can think of counterpoints to all that, too: East has been fine hockey-wise despite minimal growth for the past 40+ years, the central and west sides of Duluth are very different from north and northeast Minneapolis, and it's a much smaller market and there just aren't that many other options for people here. It's in the realm of possibility, but I don't see the Hounds fading too far away.
But, in all seriousness, congrats to Mr. Peart and a talented senior class--shame they couldn't break through. Hope Andover can represent the section well in St. Paul next week. Impressive work by Mark Manney and company to get back despite their heavy graduation losses. I doubt they'll be going away next season either.
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