On the surface, the shortcomings for Hamilton County public schools sports programs are easily recognized. Athletic facilities lag behind much of the rest of the state, and coaching staffs are shorthanded by comparison as well.
But dig deeper and one long overlooked factor emerges as the root cause for the competitive disadvantage. Before the county can begin making up ground on other schools with nicer facilities and larger coaching staffs, it must first address the fact that, for the past 20 years, Hamilton is the state's only metro county with a middle school sports calendar that does not line up with the one followed by the Tennessee Middle Schools Athletic Association.
When that decision was made in the early 1990s, it was designed to prevent sports seasons from overlapping. However, having shortened middle school seasons — none go longer than nine weeks, which is nearly half the length for the rest of the state — puts the county's young athletes behind their competition's development before they have even reached high school.
Because middle school seasons are condensed, little time is left to teach anything beyond basic fundamentals, and there is no organized weight training at that level with any county program. Also, not being aligned with the state athletic association's calendar has precluded county schools from being allowed to compete in middle school state tournaments in any sport.
While it may seem insignificant, falling behind the competition at the middle school level shows up not only in the lack of state success for high school programs, but during competition for college scholarships as well.
"Our HCAC (Hamilton County Athletic Conference) is not conducive for preparing kids to be successful in athletics," said Chris Brown, who averaged 10 wins in his four football seasons as Red Bank's head coach before resigning this year to become the defensive coordinator at Baylor School.
"The intent is that a kid can play any sport and have no overlap, but one of the toughest adjustments is those kids have no concept of how many hours a day and how many weeks in a season that they'll need to be physically and mentally prepared," Brown added. "It's something a lot of kids are never able to recover from in order to compete on the field or when it comes to outperforming others for scholarships."
In the past decade, only three football players from Hamilton County public schools have signed with a college program in one of the Power Five conferences: Quarterback Reese Phillips (Kentucky in 2013) and offensive lineman Harrison Moon (Mississippi State in 2015), both of Signal Mountain, and East Hamilton defensive back Tre Herndon (Vanderbilt in 2014). The most recent player from a county public school to sign with the University of Tennessee was Ooltewah defensive lineman Jacques Smith in 2010.
By comparison, Murfreesboro Oakland currently has seven former players on the roster of a Power Five program, and Rutherford County teams had four players sign with Power Five teams in February alone.
Former Howard football coach John Starr had more than 100 players earn college scholarships with Football Bowl Subdivision programs during his three decades coaching in Georgia. He didn't have a single FBS signee during his five years with the Hustlin' Tigers.
"I talked to college recruiters all the time," Starr said, "and they would tell me that Chattanooga is an untapped gold mine for talent but that because they were so far behind in their physical development, they couldn't take them.
"It's really sad because I've never been anywhere with kids more ambitious about wanting to better themselves, but they don't have the means."
Contact Stephen Hargis at shargis@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6293. Follow him on Twitter @StephenHargis.