Dream Bigger
Where dreams hit critical mass
This photograph was taken yesterday, August 12, shortly before noon. The school semester in Stephenville doesn’t start until next week. Put those two facts together — high school football practice in the middle of an August day, before school is even officially in session — and you get an idea of what is expected of youngsters who want to play football in Texas. The serious players get separated from the casual ones very quickly, as the coaches (above, left) watch with a sharp eye.
It is to my regret that I’ll be home in North Carolina before the football season begins. Texas high school football passed into legend in 1990 with the publication of the book, “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” which later was adapted into both a movie and a television series. It’s true that high school football is particularly intense in many places: the coal mining country of Pennsylvania, for instance, or pretty much all of the Deep South. But in Texas it seems to have achieved a whole different stature, much in the way basketball is exalted in my patch of Tobacco Road.
A couple of weeks ago I explored this phenomenon in a piece about the sale of season tickets to Stephenville High School football games. A few days ago, I talked with a radio announcer at KSTV-FM, the dominant station in town, who described for me the coverage given to the football program. On game days, the station offers a pre-game show that starts at least two hours before kickoff; then the game is broadcast live; and then there’s another two to three hours of post-game analysis. On Saturday morning the coverage continues with replays of the highlights, interviews with coaches, and lots of call-in feedback from fans. And get this: The station even does live updates from the pre-season practices.
In short, high school football probably is the single greatest unifying social force in Stephenville. Even God’s faithful are split up between many denominations. But there’s only one high school football team.
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