The first time SLUH quarterback Trevor McDonagh played at DeSmet’s Pierre LaBarge Stadium, the game didn’t go so well. McDonagh was a sophomore, making his varsity debut because SLUH senior quarterback Michael Riddering had broken his collarbone in the previous game. McDonagh’s first set of downs was a disaster: a sack, a missed throw and […]
Tag Archives | football
Tackling Virgil
This team is on a roll. Eight games into The Season, the Jr. Billikens are 5-3 and have won four in a row, including the Oct. 14 pasting of Mehlville. The game was over one minute, 32 seconds in, when Terek Hawkins (left) barreled in from the 3-yard line for his first of what would […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Hit
I didn’t see it, but I heard it from the last row of the bleachers at the exact opposite end of the field. A hit no mother wants to hear. I was sitting at the far end of the bleachers at Parkway North High School Friday, Aug. 26, near the end of the third quarter […]
Opening Kickoff
“You’re playing football?” That was my reaction four years ago, when our oldest son, Matt, an incoming freshman at Jesuit prep school St. Louis University High School, told us of his intentions to go to football camp and then tryout that August. We are not a football family. Tom, a teacher at SLUH, is also […]
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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