What's it like to play high school football?

I was actually in marching band, not in football, but I can help a bit.

The football players got more free breakfasts--often funded by theirs and the cheerleaders' moms. The bastards. (They never won a game! We got 1s in festival, and the football players never even scored a point!)

High School football is TOTLY SRS BZNS. It doesn't matter if the home team is shit, or if they're essentially gods of the field. The parents, especially, will take each game totally seriously, regardless of likelihood of winning.

You might want to check a local high school for exact locations, but games can be anywhere from a ten minute drive, meaning that the players might get in a few hours' practice, or a warm up or whatever, depending on the coach and what-not, before going home to eat and coming back to take the bus to the game, to a six hour drive. Obviously six hours is not the norm, but it does happen. Generally the teams try to find opponents a little closer, but a two to three hour drive away isn't impossible, either. Once or so a year, this will mean that the team has to leave around lunch time just to guarantee they get to the game on time. Stopping at fast food places (usually a cluster so that the students have a choice) is common, too. The band usually separated from the football team for this, and the cheerleaders could go either way (sometimes they got shoved onto our bus, I assumed the rest of the time they were with the football team, but they could have eaten elsewhere, for all I know).

As for practice? I'm not sure what actually occurs there, but I've heard that it's hellish. It doesn't matter if the team sucks or not, the practices are still hell. My dad told me about a couple of guys in his class who got into trouble once and got sentenced to a week of boot camp and found it easy compared to football practice. Occasionally a story pops up in the news about a kid getting worked too hard in football practice and dying or being permanently injured or the like. The last one I heard was a month or so ago.

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Football, yeah, I remember that. Well, practices were a pain in the butt. We started out with what we called "Two-a-day" practices in the summer. These involved a lot of running, obstacle courses, monkey drills (a drill where three guys jump over each other in a braid-like pattern on the ground), blocking drills, tackle drills, oh, and did I mention running?

The part we liked more were play drills where you split up in to teams (the starters always practiced together as a team, and subs would form B and C teams and alternate playing "O" or "D" against the starters. Usually you'd run the same play over and over while the coaches worked with the starters on blocking schemes or defensive zones or whatever.

Once or twice a week we would "scrimmage" practice where you actually ran different plays with the same offense and defense, up and down the field for the last half of practice.

As far as the actual experience of playing, the thing I remember the most is how surreal it is to be in uniform and out on the field. The helmets cover your ears and limit your field of view. You can hear your own breathing a lot and the crowd noise is really muffled. Because the helmet limits your view, you have to turn your head at the neck a lot more to see everything that you need to.

You learn a few things early - like the fact that just standing there and getting hit by someone hurts a whole heck of a lot more than it does if you meet them in the hit. I played a "z-back" position, part wide receiver and part running back, and some plays would require what was called a "crack-back", where the z back position, lined up in a wide receiver position but back off the line like a running back, would immediately run in and block the outside linebacker when the play started. Often the linebacker was busy watching the play develop and would be caught offguard. Trust me, there's nothing worse than being hit when you don't know that it's coming. Except maybe for going up in the air to catch a pass, knowing that you're going to be hit hard by the defensive back breathing down your neck. We called it "hearing footsteps," and it makes it really hard to catch the ball.

I hope that gives you a few ideas about it; if you have any specific questions, feel free to message me. I was by no means a star athlete in high school, but I remember my football days pretty well, and I can tell you a lot about what life on the "B" team was like, heh.

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Terrell Sanders
www.tsandersphoto.com
"When first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you!"