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 […]
Archive | September, 2011
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 […]
The toughest opponent
SLUH has, without question, one of the toughest prep schedules in the area. Among the opponents on the 10-game regular-season schedule are DeSmet, defending state champion Webster Groves and CBC — ranked No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, in last week’s St. Louis Post Dispatch prep football poll. And last weekend, hands-down, the season’s […]
Cerulean SLUH
The history teacher — in his 27th year at the Jesuit prep school on Oakland Ave. — doesn’t remember the exact year it began. “Probably about 12, 15 years ago,” Tom McCarthy says. “Students used to paint themselves blue and literally run down Oakland Ave. to the old CBC High School on Clayton — a […]
Behind the stats
Early in the third quarter of SLUH’s second game of the season — an unseasonably hot September night — senior running back Cameron Stubbs powered through the Ladue line and ran about 32 yards for his second touchdown of the night. It put the Jr. Bills up 20-7 and was the start of what would […]
Starry, starry night
Jack is a true football freshman, buckling up the pads for the first time and figuring out how to run, scramble and tackle in full football regalia. So expectations regarding playing time are low; we are happy with any snap or play in which No. 15 runs out on the field. So a 42-0 shellacking […]
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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