They say Skyline sports are horrible; they say Skyline sports will always stay horrible. John Young is out to change that – Skyline’s Athletic Director has a long list of goals to accomplish in order to make Skyline sports successful.
Young thinks that Skyline has a huge impact on Huron and Pioneer. The athletic directors of the other schools also voice this opinion.
“With the addition of Skyline, they take away approximately 200 of our Student-Athletes. It has a huge impact on our sports programs,” says Dottie Davis, Huron’s Athletic Director.
Lorin Cartwright, the Pioneer Athletic Director agrees with this concept. “You can’t take all of Forsythe and send it to Skyline and not say they had some exceptional athletes,” she says. “A good portion of Clague is also being sent to Skyline, and they had some exceptional athletes. And is that affecting our sports program? Absolutely.”
Young also thinks that adding Skyline into the Southeastern Conference (SEC) will have a huge impact on the conference itself. “I think the SEC is a great conference,” as he puts it. “It’s very competitive, and even though our teams aren’t playing a full conference schedule right now, they’re getting a taste of the competition they’ll face next year, which is great.”
Cartwright also chimes in on this subject. “Adding Skyline to this conference is great for the teams. It increases the competition, and it also helps even out the dominance that Huron and Pioneer are displaying right now.”
Another rumor Young has to squash is that students are going to Skyline through the lottery just to play a Varsity schedule.
Young does not deny these rumors, but he says, “I think that’s a poor reason to go to Skyline. I think that if you want to go to Skyline, you should do it for the great academics, not the athletics.”
“It’s why the ‘student’ comes before the ‘athlete’,” says Davis. “If you want to go to Skyline for the athletics, go for it. But I think that it’s a poor reason to go to a school just to play a Varsity schedule.”
Next on Young’s list is to get rid of the perception that Skyline has too much publicity. “When you have a new school, there’s bound to be questions, and people are going to want answers. So I think it’s perfectly natural that the news is going to focus a little more on Skyline until the hype has died down,” says Young.
One priority is setting up a successful sports program. Young wants to model the program based on programs that have proven to be successful. Young says he wants to be able to “take the best from all the programs and create a program that combines elements of all of the programs”.
Although Skyline may be new, Young believes that Skyline is just as good as Pioneer and Huron. “Our teams compete and play hard, just like everybody else, and we win games and lose games, just like everybody else. So to say that our teams are bad is not a fair statement.”
This is only the beginning of the challenges Young and Skyline sports will face in the near future.
