Jim Harris: Little Rock Prep Football a Disaster Area

Try these numbers on for size: The five high schools that make up the Little Rock School District have a varsity football win-loss record of 10-35. That's a winning percentage of 22 percent. For those glass-half-empty folks it's a losing percentage of 78 percent.

Take Little Rock Parkview' 7-2 record out of the mix and the mark is a ridiculously horrendous 3-33 for the largest school district in the state.

Little Rock Central will likely conclude a second straight 0-10 season on Thursday night, and veteran coach Bernie Cox, whose winning ways throughout most of his 35-year coaching career already landed him a spot in the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, will be stepping down at season's end.

Just five years removed from back-to-back state titles, it's an awful way to see such a legendary coach go out. Cox began his coaching career with a state championship at Central right out of the shoot, in 1975, and he amassed 271 wins in the ninth week of the 2007 season. Twenty games later, he's still at 271. He's been too much of a force on the state prep level for too long to be going out like this.

Little Rock Hall, which competes one class lower than Central, in 6A-East, at least has one win this season. Little Rock McClellan has one win. Little Rock J.A. Fair has, yes, one win. Most of the losses by those three schools have not been close.

Somehow, coach William Hardiman has managed to fashion a winner out of one school, Parkview, that seemed destined never to experience the level of greatness it achieved in the 1970s and early '80s. Most people reasoned that after Parkview became an Arts and Science magnet high school, the Patriots might be able to field outstanding basketball teams - as both Charles Ripley and Al Flanigan have managed to do in the past two decades - because it only took a handful of players, but would not have enough athletes to be competitive in football.

Hardiman, however, has these Patriots believing as they head to a 6A playoff spot. But searching for other playoff games among public schools in Central Arkansas in the coming weeks will be almost futile.

One immediate reason that fans will point to for the precipitous drop in public school football fortunes is the rise in recent years of private schools.

The records of those schools, though, belie that idea that they've siphoned off many of the good players at, say, Central's or Hall's expense. The seven private schools in the greater Little Rock area have combined for a .500 winning percentage in 2009, at 31-31. The privates are bolstered by traditionally strong Pulaski Academy, which stands at 7-2 and is likely to win its 5A-Southwest conference, but that is offset by Little Rock Lutheran, at 0-8 in 2A football.