9781422283035

ALL ABOUT FOOTBALL

I nside H igh S chool F ootball A Changing Tradition

by John Walters

ALL ABOUT FOOTBALL

F antasy F ootball

F ootball and P layer S afety

I nside C ollege F ootball : P reparing for the P ros ?

I nside H igh S chool F ootball : A C hanging T radition

I nside P ro F ootball M edia

T he I ntense W orld of a P ro F ootball C oach

T he P ro F ootball D raft

P ro F ootball P layers in the N ews

R unning P ro F ootball : C ommissioners , O wners , F ront O ffice , and M ore

T he S uper B owl : M ore T han a G ame

I nside H igh S chool F ootball : A C hanging T radition

by John Walters

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C ontents

Chapter 1: Origins, Traditions, and Growth …….…… 6 Chapter 2: Levels of Play …….…….…….…….…….… 20 Chapter 3: Training …….…….…….…….…….…….… 34 Chapter 4: High School Football Industrial Complex …… 48 Find Out More …….…….…….…….…….…….…….… 62 Series Glossary of Key Terms …….…….…….…….… 63 Index/About the Author …….…….…….…….…….… 64

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C hapter 1

Boys (and now girls) of all shapes and sizes take part in high school football, a sport that is undergoing some changes.

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O rigins , T raditions , and G rowth

High school football, as an American tradition, is nearly as old as the American version of football. It began in Connecticut in 1875, with a game between Norwich Free Academy and New London High School. Today, high school football is played in all 50 states, Canada, and around the world on U.S. military bases. The southernmost high school in the continental United States, Key West High School, fields a football team (the Fighting Conchs), as does the northernmost

Words to Understand disproportionately earning more than its fair share, or representing a larger share than expected mythical not real

proliferate expand throughout, spread out wide and far venue a location at which people gather for an event

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American high school, Barrow High (the Whalers). The Whal- ers sometimes fly 500 miles for road games and were the sub- ject of a film, Touchdown on the Tundra . Hawaii, the 50th state, has produced a Heisman Trophy winner (Marcus Mariota) and a Heisman runner-up (Manti

T’eo) in recent years. High school football has spread to American territories in the Pacific such as Guam and Samoa. High school football has extended to all four corners of the United States and beyond. Turkey Bowls The first football game in the United States was be- tween a pair of New Jersey colleges, Princeton and Rutgers, in November of 1869. Six years earlier, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln had fixed the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day on the calendar. It was not long before high schools set

Manti T’eo crossed the ocean from Hawaii to star at Notre Dame and then join the NFL’s San Diego Chargers.

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aside Thanksgiving as a day on which to play their football rivals. In 1875, Norwich Free Academy in Norwich, Connecticut, met New London (Conn.) High School on Thanksgiving, although the two schools had played earlier that spring. More than 140 years later, the Wildcats and Whalers still take part in what is the nation’s oldest high school Thanksgiving Day rivalry. There are about 100 Thanksgiving Day high school football rivalry games, also known as Turkey Bowls, that date back more than a century. Most of them take place in the northeast United States. The oldest continuous public high school rivalry, dating to 1882, is between Needham High and Wellesley High in Massachusetts—fitting since the first Thanksgiving took place in what would later be Massachusetts. Most Turkey Bowls kick off at 10 a . m . so that spectators will have time to celebrate the holiday with family and a sumptuous feast later. In Connecticut, where Turkey Bowls and wild turkey proliferate , annual games such as Ansonia-Shelton draw more than 10,000 spectators.

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Beyond the State Level There is currently no such thing as a high school football national championship game, but don’t be surprised if such an event is hatched soon. There is simply too much interest and too many potential television viewers for a high school Super Bowl to prevent it from becoming a reality. An annual high school national champion has been recognized by a poll of some sort dating all the way to 1910, when Oak Park (Illinois) High School won its first of four consecutive national champion- ships as chosen by the National Sports News Ser- vice. Until 1982, the NSNS was the lone entity that dubbed a mythical high school national champion,

Bishop Gorman High (in orange) is one of a handful of national

powers in high school football.

but then USA Today got involved. The “nation’s newspaper” be- gan printing a weekly Super 25, which heightened interest in, and awareness of, gridiron powers from coast to coast. In the past 15 years, schools whose names regularly appear in

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the Super 25 (e.g., De La Salle, John Curtis) have taken to regularly playing games early in the season versus out- of-state opponents, often playing such games on national television. In 2015 Bishop Gorman, a Catholic school based in Las Vegas, Nevada, played opponents from Arizona, Utah, Washington, New Jer- sey, and California (twice). The year be- fore, the Gaels, rated No. 1 in the nation by USA Today , hosted No. 2 St. John Bos- co of Bellflower, Calif., on a Friday evening, and the game aired on ESPN. Rarely does a college sport outside of football and basketball air on the main ESPN chan- nel, but this high school football game did. (Gorman won 34–31.) Private Versus Public Valor Christian School, a private high school located in Highlands Ranch, Colo., opened in 2007 and did not have a senior

De La Salle In September of 1992, De La Salle High in

Concord, Calif., began the longest win streak in the his- tory of high school football: 151 games—or more than twice as long as the previ- ous record of 72 games. The architect of those wins was Bob Ladouceur, who took over the program in 1979 at age 25. The Catholic all-boys school, which was founded in 1965, had never had a winning football sea- son before Ladouceur was named coach. During Ladouceur’s 34 seasons, the Spartans won 17 state championships. He retired in 2012. His lifetime .934 winning percentage is a national high school record.

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class until 2009. In the first seven years that Valor Christian included seniors in its enrollment (2009–2015), the school won six state championships in football. There are more than twice the number of public high schools as private high schools (30,381 to 11,941, accord-

Meet high school coaching legend Bob Ladouceur

ing to the United States National Center of Edu- cation Statistics), but a disproportionately high number of private schools dominate the gridiron. Fourteen schools that finished in USA Today Su- per 25 season-ending rankings for 2015 were pri- vate institutions, including back-to-back mythical national champion Bishop Gorman. There are fewer private schools, which normally have lower enrollments than public schools, so how come so many of them are elite football powers? “The primary difference between public and private schools is that private school enrollments are not restricted by geographical boundaries,” a 2015 ar- ticle in the Journal of American Sport stated. “Private

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schools can therefore be more selective in the num- ber and quality of students admitted.” If you live in or near a major city, you are well aware of that. The nearest public high school may only accept students who live within its geographical boundaries. A private school may accept any student that it likes, which allows private schools to gather tal- ent from a far greater area. And once a private school experiences gridiron success, it attracts junior high students—as well as older students—who are seeking to play for a successful program. In 2014, Rashan Gary, a 6-foot 4-inch, 290- pound (193-cm, 131-kg) defensive tackle who played

Rashan Gary made several high school all-star teams and started playing at the University of Michigan in 2016.

at a public high school, Scotch Plains-Fanwood in New Jersey, as a freshman and sophomore, transferred to Paramus Catholic High School for his final two sea- sons. Paramus Catholic ad- vanced to the state cham- pionship one year, but Gary

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would become the most highly coveted high school recruit in the nation following his senior season. Private schools usually offer better facilities and often better academics. Unlike public schools, though, there are almost always tuition costs to con- sider. At Valor Christian, for example, tuition is more than $17,000 per school year. Home-Schooled BMOCs In 2007, a charismatic quarterback at the University of Florida named Tim Tebow won the Heisman Trophy. One year later, he led the Gators to the national cham- pionship. Tebow’s tale was even more intriguing be- cause he was homeschooled. The son of missionaries, Tebow played for Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, Florida, but he never attended classes there. In the past 20 years, the number of stu-

dents aged 5–17 who are homeschooled has nearly doubled in the United States. While the percentage of homeschooled students is still meager, between three and four percent, the question of whether they

A look at the Homeschool Football League

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