This is why people were so furious with Bethlehem Catholic when they really ramped up in the 1990s. Becahi sits right in the middle of a lot of schools with long football traditions and that had been really successful. You saw the effect immediately - when Bob Stem retired, within four years Liberty was in the state final. They beat Easton in three state D11 finals - with a running back from Easton. It's just a very different environment from "the whole city is open enrollment and kids kind of go wherever" or "we have all of these CYO feeder programs and lots of Catholic elementary schools that traditionally feed schools like this." It's a lot of very involved community based programs with tons of outreach from the high schools staffs, almost all kids playing affiliated Jr. High football at programs that are winners, then lots of hurt feelings.
And, as we've seen with Becahi over the last ten years or so, it can really ebb and flow based on how together they have things, because it's easy to lose a lot of that player in-flow. One mistake I think Bethlehem Catholic made is they took tons of kids on the promise of "exposure" and also seemed to clean up on talented malcontents, which has gained Becahi a reputation around the Valley in football that I don't think they're super proud of. Allentown Central Catholic has always been a much more CYO based program, and I think that's why perception of the two programs is so vastly different locally, even if ACC gets lumped in with a lot of the private school complaints statewide.
Where things obviously get wild around here is wrestling. Bethlehem Catholic and Notre Dame sit in the middle of probably the most dense population of talent in the United States (WPIAL guys are going to get on me here, but the geographic footprint of the WPIAL is so much greater than the Lehigh Valley) that it's so easy for kids to get to Becahi/ND that they can load up with national caliber teams every year. But in doing so, kids are most often leaving EXCELLENT programs. I understand kids leaving Salisbury, Catasauqua, Whitehall, Palisades, etc. to go be a part of these bigtime programs. But they're also pulling in kids from Northampton, Nazareth, Easton, Parkland, Phillipsburg, etc. that are themselves national caliber programs that go to all of the same events, have either Hall of Fame coaches of elite, young, former NCAA qualifiers running their programs. Hell, even an off the grid program like Stroudsburg around here has an NCAA qualifier as a head coach who has produced multiple state finalist and Division I kids, gotten his program into huge national tournaments when he's had national kids. So when Becahi is wrestling Northampton in the PIAA Team finals with two Northampton kids in the lineup, or Nazareth (who has probably the best high school coach in history) has a state champion transfer to Notre Dame the year after Nazareth won a team title, it doesn't feel like it's kids jumping for better opportunities, it's just building an All Star team because the rules say you can. Then add on having a roster with kids as far east as Hackettstown, New Jersey, as far north as East Stroudsburg, as far south as Doylestown, and as far west as Reading, it just kind of feels like "what are we doing here?"
