It’s time once again for a look at this week’s District XI high school football poll results, consisting of area head coaches, athletic directors and media members.
Big Schools (10 pollsters)
- Parkland (50 points, 10-first place votes)
- Freedom (39)
- Easton (27)
- Nazareth (19)
- Liberty (15)
Among the big schools…no changes again for the #1, 4 and 5 teams. Parkland continues to roll and hasn’t done anything to tarnish its preseason predictions as one of the state’s top teams. Nazareth and Liberty both posted pairs of wins the last two weeks to stay in the mix.
Easton, who had been #3 before an impressive win over Emmaus pushed them up to second in our previous poll, falls back a spot following their loss to Central Catholic. Freedom had little trouble dispatching the Vikings when they played them last Friday. The Patriots’ game was our live contest last week–check out the highlights here…
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It’s been a much tighter race among the smaller schools.
Small Schools (10 pollsters)
- Saucon Valley (41 points, 5-first place votes)
- Becahi (39 points, 4-first place votes)
- Notre Dame (33, 1-first place vote)
- Central Catholic (23)
- Northwestern (10)
Also receiving at least one vote: Northern Lehigh, Palmerton, Salisbury
The Panthers hold onto the #1one spot–barely–as we cross into the second half of the regular season. Undefeated Saucon Valley had probably its toughest game thus far before beating Northwestern, who moved back into the fifth spot in our poll with their solid showing. Bethlehem Catholic continues to roll as the number-two team with its only loss so far coming at the hands of the Hurricanes. Another undefeated team, Notre Dame, continues to gain momentum with a solid “W” against Palmerton and replaced the Vikings at the third-top team in our poll.
Although Salisbury failed to place in our poll this week, the Falcons represented themselves well this past Saturday on RCN TV.
Don’t forget, all of our local sports coverage is available to watch for free at any time for up to two months on RCN On Demand.
A reminder about our polls: our pollsters consist of many people over the entire Lehigh Valley region. Our voting panel consists of local media members from different outlets, along with local coaches and athletic directors from across the entire district. The voters are not identified so they can give their honest impressions without any worry of outside pressures or “bulletin board” material, and we rotate different pollsters from different schools each year, including guests from our biggest to our smallest schools.
As in previous years, we take the 400-male enrollment number as the cutoff for schools within the District XI/RCN footprint. All schools above that number qualify as “big schools” in our poll. These schools consist of Parkland, Liberty, Allen, Easton, Emmaus, Liberty, Dieruff, Freedom, Stroudsburg, Pleasant Valley, Northampton, Nazareth, E. Stroudsburg-South, Whitehall, Southern Lehigh and Bangor. “Small schools” (below 400-male enrollment) consist of Saucon Valley, Central Catholic, Bethlehem Catholic, Northwestern, Wilson, Palisades, Palmerton, Salisbury, Notre Dame, Pen Argyl, Nolehi and Catasauqua. Each pollster identifies their top five teams in each group—the top school gets five points, the second team gets four points and so on, with an average score determining the order of teams in the poll.
Keep checking back to the “SportsTalk Shop” as we’ll be updating our pollsters’ opinions once again in a few weeks.
