It's all about consistently good coaching and the football culture in the school and town. The nine or ten schools that KidSilverhair mentions, plus a handful of others, are FOOTBALL schools. It's what the kids from their feeder programs talk about, practice for, and are enthused about from the time they can walk. Other schools the same size or even bigger (won't name them) have dysfunctional programs in comparison. The last 15- 18 years, the best programs are in the Des Moines suburbs, no doubt. Some of the bigger cities in the east, aside from CR, CF and IC, have more poor programs than good programs. In the last forty years, the city of Davenport (proper) has only Assumption which is pretty good because of their Rising Knights program, Waterloo (not CF) hasn't been good for many years and Dubuque has one state championship in football in the last 70 years (Hempstead) and that was 36 years or so ago. Wahlert and Senior, I believe, haven't been past the state quarterfinals in football since Grover Cleveland was president, or at least since there have been playoffs. In Wahlert's feeder schools, more than twice as many boys play basketball than play football. Senior had something like 50 basketball teams registered in an elementary hoops clinic there. Football is not King in many schools. Success breeds success in sports, but especially in a sport like football, in which it literally takes a small army of dedicated players, consistently good coaching on all levels, and legions of avid supporters to be successful year after year.
