SMALL TOWN FOOTBALL: PROLOG
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
Small town football is awesome! It is Friday Night Lights without the distraction of college recruiters and kids or parents worrying about getting scholarships. In our league of high schools with less than 200 students, about once every ten years was there someone good enough to play in college. We couldn’t have cared less. We played for our school, our community, our Moms and Dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles, girlfriends and for a chance to win a league championship. We also wanted that elusive and so important spot in the top five in the state according to the AP Poll. The fact the small town sports writers throughout the state voted on this poll without having actually seen most of the teams play did not matter. Whichever team/school had the most votes in the final poll was the state champion!
If you had been in a commercial jet on a Friday night in the fall, flying high over southwest Washington, you would have seen splotches of bright lights spread aimlessly below, each about twenty miles apart. Those were the lights of the schools with home games. My school, Mossyrock High School, home of the Vikings, was one of them.
Game preparation and buildup actually began late Friday the previous week. Kids from all over the county would gather at the Skyline Restaurant on the newly built I-5 freeway. Team buses on the way home from games would stop to allow kids to grab a burger and shake. But the main reason for the stop at this centrally located restaurant, was to find out who won their games that night. We really did not associate with the kids from other schools all that much like they do nowadays. There were no summer basketball leagues or camps to attend with kids from different communities. We would talk briefly with kids from schools such as Toledo, Winlock, Onalaska or Tenino to see who won and how certain players did. Useful information was hard to come by because we were reluctant to share information.
With the advent of instantaneous information, people today can be watching a high school game in one town and be in constant contact with fans in other towns and get almost play by play news of the games in progress. This could include pictures and videos as well, using the ever present cell phones.
In the 1960’s, if we didn’t find out what we needed to know at the Skyline, we would often have to wait until late on Saturday to get any real news of the Friday night games.
On Saturday afternoon the big and important news would arrive. We would wait patiently for the Daily Chronicle to arrive, which, at our house, was around 4:00 PM. The Chronicle was printed in Centralia and was the major newspaper for all of Lewis County. It was every little kid’s dream to get his name or, what a wonderful experience, his picture, in the Chronicle for people in all of Lewis County to see. Awesome!
I remember when my oldest brother, Rich, was a sophomore on a pretty good 1955 Mossyrock team. As a little used sub, during a route of Randle, he scored on a 77 yard touchdown run. He was so excited to see his name in the paper and very impatiently waited for its delivery. He quickly grabbed the paper from the box and started reading even before he got inside. We then heard him say, “SHIT, THAT’S NOT FAIR.” He came into the house and slammed himself on to the couch. Dad grabbed the paper and started reading aloud. It had a recap of the game and then it came to Rich’s run. It said, “in the 4th quarter, Mossyrock made it 56-0 when a Viking player scored on a 70 yard run.” Dad and I tried not to chuckle because Rich was so mad. He yelled to Mom, “It was 77 yards and they called me a player.” All the next week at school the seniors called him “player.” Rich made up for up his senior year when his name was mentioned a lot.
We would pour over the paper each Saturday. Did Toledo keep their win streak alive? Did Morton beat White Pass in the big east end rivalry game? How did Johnson (the asshole, according to “Danny) do for Tenino? He was the state’s leading scorer. Most importantly, which of our players names would we see in print? Who would the coach mention that would make him famous throughout the county? I do believe I was 0 for Career, but I was hopeful each week.
We showed up on Monday ready to prepare for our Friday night foe. There was no film to watch of our previous game as it took several days for any kind of super 8 film to process. I do remember watching some grainy film of Toledo before we played them, but we could barely make out who anybody was, let alone look at any plays. The coaches would send someone to scout our opponent and after practice on Monday we would go over the scouting report. On Tuesday and Wednesday we would have regular practice with the second team simulating the other team’s offense. Thursday was a night practice with no pad as we worked on special teams – kickoff, punts and punt returns. We had no one who could come close to kicking the football through the goal posts so we saved time by not working on that part of the game.
Thursday was also another newspaper night. After our night practice we would race home to read the paper to see what was written about upcoming games. The important section was the all-important panel of sportswriters who picked who they thought would win each game and by how much. If we were picked to lose by the majority of the seven person panel, we knew Coach Taylor would use that as incentive in his pregame talk.
Friday was game day. Mr. Taylor, our coach, was an old Marine (“old” in my 17 year old mind. He was probably 35) who believed in discipline in all things, including how we looked. Arriving at school we went to his room to receive a brand new set of long white shoe strings for our football shoes which we had taken home the night before and spit polished as he had taught us. We wore our game jerseys with the shoe strings as bolo ties. This was prideful and heady stuff. By the time I was a senior, the girls would wear the shoestrings around their own necks with their boyfriend’s class ring hanging from it. I think this is when Mr. Taylor thought it was time to quit coaching. I don’t think he, the former Marine who fought in Korea, enjoyed looking at his football warriors walking the halls holding hands with girlfriends who had the shoelaces he bought, draped around the girls neck. He did quit a couple years after I graduated and went on to become a very successful high school principal for many years.
Last period, the football team was excused 40 minutes early to go to the locker room. Everyone else was excused ten minutes later and would gather in the gym bleachers, grouped by classes. Once everyone was seated, the band would start playing and then the players would enter from the locker room, walking single file and join their classes in the bleachers. The students would stand and cheer and the cheerleaders would dance around as the school song was played. There would be skits, class competitions – pie eating, three legged races, and other events designed for fun and the embarrassment of the contestants – more cheers by the cheerleaders and then Coach Taylor would speak. He commanded so much respect that when he stood, the raucous crowd would become completely silent. His talks were always about doing your best and being a good sport.
We would stand and walk out as the band played and the students cheered. How could this adulation not make one want risk getting concussions, broken legs or lacerations for their dear old school?
Towns of 500 people would have a thousand attending a big game. Wooden covered bleachers, made with volunteer labor, were on the home side and held about 500 people. The visitor’s side, if the fans were lucky, could sit on cold metal portable bleachers with no roof. These held about 200 people for most schools.
However, the real fans, those hard core men and women who stood on the sidelines, drinking coffee laced with the alcohol of their choice brought in loggers black thermoses. Some of those same people had got off work early to be able to have a Dam Burger (in Mossyrock anyway – all towns had their own version) and several beers before heading to the game; with their thermos of course. These fans seemed to be the loudest in support or protest of, well, most anything. When I write “standing on the sideline,” that was pretty much it. Some schools did not even have a restraining rope. Fans would literally have their feet on the field and often times have to jump quickly out of the way, sometimes pulling little five year old Johnny out of harm’s way, when a 180 pound lineman came barreling past the sideline to make a tackle. By the time I was in high school, the league had become civilized and restraining ropes lined the field making the fans root for their team 15 feet from the sideline. This also helped in that fans, many having numerous pre game beers, now could not mix with the players, offering unneeded advice and encouragement.
The Booster Club (every school had a booster club) would be selling hot dogs, hot chocolate, coffee, popcorn and various candy bars and goodies. The Lions or some other organization, sold cords of wood chopped by the guys who spent all day in the woods during the week.
Cheerleaders from both schools, dressed in outfits that made them look so cute and peppy in the warm fall, but turned them blue and shivering by November, would try to outdo each other with routines they learned at the Ellensburg cheer camp the previous summer. The opposing bands would do the same, trying to see who could play the loudest, if not the best.
The lights came on around 6:00 for a 7:30 game. Games had started at 8:00, but that gave locals way too much time in the tavern, so 7:30 became the compromise. At our school, the lights, which had been a volunteer project as well, were turned on one pole at a time. The athletic director or his designe’ had to climb a short ladder to reach a lock. Once the lock was opened, a hook-like four foot metal pole was used to push up the handle on the fuse box. The bright lights would come on and people would clap. The person (I did this for 12 years when I was AD) felt a little satisfaction from the brief clapping that would occur after each bank of lights came on. This had to be repeated eight times. Then the field was bright as day and could be seen from that jet flying over.
About one half hour before the game was to begin, the teams took the field. Cheerleaders had put up ten feet wide and four foot high construction paper banners for the players to run though as they yelled and screamed on the way to the field. The construction paper companies must love this still popular tradition. The area was a sea of red and black (Mossyrock colors) mixed with the colors of the opposing school.
Bands played, fans cheered, players warmed up, little kids, played their own football version behind the bleachers and everyone was eating or drinking something. As the large digital scoreboard ran down to zero and the players lined up on the sidelines for the national anthem, sometimes a large moon full moon would appear above the hills and fir trees in the distant. This was heaven. A small town football game was getting ready to start.
The games themselves become a blur after so many years, but the excitement of them remains with those who were lucky enough to play, for the rest of their lives. I feel so blessed that I went to a small school where a kid of way less than average athletic ability could actually start two years for a pretty good team.
After the game, the lighting procedure was reversed. Most often the person shutting off the lights, two hours after the end of the game, was the only one left in the entire area. One by one the lights went off. There was no clapping. The only noise heard were cars going by on highway 12.
It was kind of eerie when that last light went out and what was just two hours earlier, a field full of players with pads cracking, cheerleaders yelling at the top of their lungs, fans loudly urging on their sons and neighbors, and bands blaring their fight songs, all with a total cacophony of expectation, joy, despair and excitement, quickly became pitch dark, quiet and lonely. The game was over. But the lights would come on again…… and again.
Below: Pictures of typical small town football.
