Thanks to everyone out there who took part in and/or sonated to yesterday’s Step Out: Walk to Fight Diabetes in New Canaan. It was such a fantastic event, both from the entertainment and educational point of view. Gerri Brown of the American Diabetes Association said the move to New Canaan helped bring out a greater number of walkers, but the ADA still fell short of its goal. So… we’ll keep trying to help out. Maybe as a sponsor, I can make more of an impact to help raise awareness of the disease beyond just the bill Gonillo 5 poll.
The New Canaan Rams football team walked again this year (you can still make a donation to their walk team). This time, they didn’t sprint. And they also had head coach Lou Marinelli walk as a part of its team. So of course the sports reporters on my team – Rob Adams of WGCH-AM and Jim Fuller of the New Haven Register (Matt Levine of WSTC/WNLK-AM ran the 3-mile course, cause he’s in shape!) – seized the opportunity to grill Marinelli on everything and anything.
Okay, really, we didn’t grill Marinelli. And he escaped us at the turn-around. But we did give him our two cents about the FCIAC’s scheduling, which has become complicated since the Fairfield school split a few years back gave the league an odd number of schools.
Fuller told Marinelli how it’s done in the 20-team Southern Connecticut Conference, where they break it down to four divisions based on size and strength. Then every two years, the out-of-division match-ups change takes place based on a team’s prior two seasons’ results.
So if you finish first in your division over a two-year period, you would play your four division rivals, and the other three first-place finishers and I think three of the teams from your crossover division.
Why did we bring it up? Basicly there’s some unfair contests on the FCIAC schedules that really don’t do anyone any good. The Greenwich-Harding game on Saturday comes to mind. Greenwich won 41-0 (on its homecoming).
Greenwich has a big clash up in Danbury this Friday that it would have been better preparing for. If you’re Greenwich, how do you get your team motivated to play Harding? And if you’re Harding, how do you pick your team back up after it takes part in that sort of game?
I’m not trying to sound mean, I’m just saying there needs to be some competitive balance here. Maybe instead of basing the schedules on size alone, strength needs to be put into consideration.
Then of course you’ll have some coaches say they have no chance to make the CIAC playoffs because they have to play too tough a schedule, and a string of 5-5 seasons could create a lack of interest in football.
What do you think? As the FCIAC football schedule good, bad, or somewhere in the middle?
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