Late in the fourth quarter of the SLUH-DeSmet freshman game Oct. 11, Pete Klug (right), in at wide receiver for the Spartans, leaped, reached and hauled in a long pass near the SLUH 10-yard line. DeSmet, leading 30-16, had the game well in hand after putting up 23 unanswered points in the third quarter. Klug’s […]
Center of attention
High school football is both brutal and beautiful, exhilarating and humiliating. For the moms. The players? They’d probably choose different adjectives. Now seven games into the season, there’s a motherhood of brotherhood that has evolved around SLUH football. At every game you’ll find 45 moms in various incarnations of Jr. Billiken apparel, proudly wearing our […]
Air Force One
It’s not every day the President of the United States flies into town to see a freshman football game – especially your freshman football game. OK, so maybe that wasn’t the reason President Barack Obama was visiting St. Louis on Oct 4, 2011. Something about a $25,000 per person fundraiser at one of the stately […]
Turning points
Sometimes you miss them, those moments in a game that become turning points. And sometimes, you don’t yet know how pivotal a key tackle, or a made-extra point, or a punt that pins the opponent down on the 1-yard will be until after all four quarters are played. And so at the start of the […]
The roster
Watching a freshman football game is like trying to keep track of fish in an aquarium. For five games now this season, I’ve watched the players run up, down, backward, forward, hither and yon on a 120 x 531/3 square-yard piece of grass, thrilled when they made a play and wondering why I kept forgetting […]
Bookends
St. Louis is unique in its plethora of private Catholic high schools. Dozens of them sprinkled throughout the metropolitan area, — all boys, all-girls, co-ed — each with their own traditions and persona and drawing students from an abundance of Catholic St. Louis families. That’s why “Where’d you go to high school?” is as ubiquitous […]
Spots and inches
With a little over two minutes left in the Sept. 22 SLUH-Vianney freshmen game, the Golden Griffins took possession on their own 35-yard line, down 20-14 with one final chance to mount a comeback. It had been a tight game. SLUH scored early in the 4th quarter but narrowly missed the extra point, and the […]
My 15
We are in a stretch of five games in nine days, two varsity and three freshmen games — including a designated “D” game that found us at CBC yet again Sept. 19, looking west into a late-summer setting sun. So that’s why I didn’t see The Fumble Recovery (right). Yeah, let’s blame it on the […]
Regarding Henry
Henry Jones played 12 seasons as a safety in the NFL, 10 with the Buffalo Bills. He was All-Pro in 1992 and appeared in three consecutive Super Bowls. In his career as a safety, he made 18 interceptions, four of which resulted in touchdowns. He once made a key interception of Joe Montana in a […]
Blink, and you’ll miss it
Freshmen football is a rollercoaster ride, up one minute and down the next. The SLUH freshmen are on the downswing, suffering another big loss at the hands of the CBC Cadets. 42-7 was the final score, and even I got that wrong. Besides updating the game on the Twitter feed, I was doing a pretty […]
Writing The Season
Seventeen years at The Sporting News, a national weekly sports magazine, should have prepared me for one year of covering HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL. But while the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern taught me the intracacies of story development, nothing I learned there prepared me for feeding, clothing and watering a 190-pound defensive end and a 130-pound wide receiver. So I'm writing about it -- and tweeting everything from how to stay awake when the spin cycle begins at midnight to watching your sons run onto a field on a golden, crisp fall evening.
Going Long
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