I coached against them, 05-09, 11, and it was tough. The kids were good, and wanted to be good, but the coaching and support was lacking. They typically have 20+ valedictorians each year, anyone pretty much that has over a 4.0 because they can't differentiate the better student when they all are taking classes at the JC's. Incoming Freshmen, if mom and dad are Tiger enough, enroll in 0-period (before school) PE classes so they can take an additional class during the day, puts them 2-3 classes ahead by end of soph year. One of my neighbors, when the school boundary lines were shifted a bit, sold his house and moved 4 blocks to get on the MSJ side of the border. I'm talking the $900k type home back in '06. Kids would get extra credit for going to the games. So you would see groups of kids up in the stands at their games, studying for the SAT, had no idea what a football game was. Academic pressure is immense, the competition is fierce. There were kids dropping out of MSJ and going to other schools in the district because of the pressure to get A's and they couldn't take it. It starts in elementary school, my son was hauled in for 'academic testing' in 2nd grade because he liked recess more than school, liked to run and jump, he didn't fit the mold. The district counselor who did the testing said he had no idea why he was testing my son, he was a normal kid. I believe MSJ is still the only MVAL team to have won a football section championship. I do know that the badminton teams in the MVAL will kick your ass, when I was there it wasn't uncommon for the badminton team to be 2x as large as the football program.