Friday Night

By Leslie McCarthy on November 10, 2011 in General, The Varsity

All this week, Friday Night seeps into every thought.

Getting up in the morning and getting ready to leave the house. Driving in. Eating lunch. In the hallways. Driving home. At dinner.

And that’s just the moms.

The dads: They’ll never let on.

And the boys, well, they’re as cool as can be, eating their enormous breakfasts, getting their college applications in order, going to classes and doing their homework while texting and Tweeting in between.

But the moms? Friday Night has been first and foremost on this mom’s mind since last Saturday morning, when, as has become my weekly ritual, I creeped into Matt’s bedroom, grabbed the disposable garbage bag that doubles as a hamper and carefully extracted a dirty uniform from bag to washing machine with all the delicacy of hazardous waste disposal.

Saturday morning laundry is not a delicate thing, but for 11 weeks now it has been a chore I’ve embraced, because, well, that’s my boy on that team. So the joy of the previous night’s victory over Oakville lasted as long as it took for the cold water to fill the machine, and by the time the spin cycle started, time to think about Friday Night.

We’re moms. We live for moments like this picture above — of Lisa Hinkebein and her junior son Matthew — when our sons will walk off the field with big smiles on their faces and happily pause for pictures.

And of course, we worry. We anticipate. We obsess. We launder.

It’s not just the moms of the players, either. SLUH coach Gary Kornfeld’s mom goes to every game, home and away, and has for the last 24 years. You can read about Rosemarie Kornfeld here in a story I wrote for the South County Times.

In the meantime, it’s only Thursday morning. Who we are playing again? Oh yeah. DeSmet. That team. At SLUH, under the lights on what is supposed to be a cool, crisp November night. You know this because you’ve checked weather.com every day this week to see if the forecast has changed.

Friday Night still seems like a long time away. Isn’t there some laundry to do?

Photos by Nancy Winkelmann. To view more SLUH varsity football photos from the entire season, visit nancywinkelmann.zenfolio.com/varsitypix.

About Leslie McCarthy

Leslie Gibson McCarthy saw her first live football game at the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Mo., an annual tilt between St. Louis area high school rivals CBC and St. Louis U. High. She remembers nothing about the game, other than the fact that she sat on the SLUH side and she spent a great deal of time wondering why they put a football field on a perfectly good baseball diamond. 35 years, one husband, two teenagers and a journalism career later, she views a football field as a thing of beauty, and now writes about everything from football to footwear as a former sportswriter and weekly lifestyle columnist for the suburban St. Louis South County Times. Follow the Season of her life here, and read her weekly column at www.southcountytimes.com.

View all posts by Leslie McCarthy →

Subscribe to our e-mail newsletter to receive updates.