High School Sports and Free Lunch, Or Why Tehachapi Should Not be in the SSL, part 1

From the top success feels like the natural result of virtue. The Yankees and Wall Street executives agree, hard work, smarts, and determination are what it takes to get ahead. The world is basically just and open to talent and ambition. Royals fans and the guy whose job on the line was just shipped to China typically have a more skeptical view. Lotteries are most popular with the poor. Maybe that is because they don't understand probability, but maybe the randomness of it just makes sense - the rest of the world seems to run on luck and long odds too.

Reality is surely a mix of these two pictures and high school sports are no different. I would be the last to deny that high school sports reward a certain strength of character with victories. However, I am also impressed by how often the schools that do best in at least the major sports of football and basketball are also among the most affluent and how often those with the worst teams are also among the poorest. But is this just my selective memory? Poor schools can't be at that much of a disadvantage. Look where professionals come from. It's not Beverly Hills.

This is something I have been interested in for a while now. Last year, I made a start taking enrollment and percentage of students on free lunch stats from the state and football ratings from Calpreps.com. I collected data for more than 400 California public schools - rich and poor, urban and rural, southern, northern, coastal, desert. It is a time intensive process and as I added schools the findings were so consistent that I decided to stop, satisfying my curiosity about three things: 1) The bigger the school, the better the football team 2) the lower the percentage of students on free lunch, the better the football team and 3) within a pretty wide enrollment range, percentage of kids on free lunch is better predictor of how good a school's football team will be than enrollment.

This year, I decided to think about the local scene. Tomorrow, I will have a post on the local area, complete with pretty graphs and an explanation of why Tehachapi should not be in the SSL.

Read part 2 here.