Cliff Brunt: Why high school football is great
By CLIFF BRUNT
ISL Editor
There are few things in life I enjoy more than covering high school football.
I’ve covered many of the biggest events in sports – the Final Four, the Olympics, the Super Bowl – and through it all, I have never taken prep football for granted. Tonight, I will cover two high school games for my website, Indy Sports Legends, and for the Indianapolis Star. Cardinal Ritter will play Heritage Christian and Merrillville will face Warren Central in the PeyBack Classic at Lucas Oil Stadium.
I am fired up.
Part of it is because I played. I was just average, a 175-pound nose guard at Omaha North, yet playing on the varsity team remains one of the most significant accomplishments of my life. The rush of running onto the field as a starter for the first time against Council Bluffs Abraham Lincoln in 1991 has been matched few times since.
A lot of my friends love high school football, just like I do. We relive our revised pasts and dreams through these young men who chase glory, like many of us once did.
But there’s much more to love about it than going into a mental time machine.
I’m excited to see the wide eyes of these young kids with their entire lives ahead of them. They all believe they can be great. They have to or they’ll never see the field. Their
reasons for being there vary slightly. Maybe they want to impress their friends or a girl. Maybe they want to impress their dads or prove someone wrong. Whatever the reason, football brings out the competitor in kids.
I can’t wait to hear pads popping. It’s the signature sound of the modern-day coliseum, the sound of sacrifice, the sound that makes us older guys look at our scrapes and think back to exactly how they got there.
I look forward to watching young people work together. With 10 other guys on the field, you need teamwork or you can’t win or be safe. Other people literally have to have your back. When it’s done the right way, it’s a joy to see.
Football, perhaps more than other prep sports, inspires loyalty to school. The entire school, it seems, is deflated on Monday if the team lost on Friday. There is a sense of urgency in the sport, and it shows.
I actually look forward to seeing parents with no sense of reality. It’s hilarious to watch grown people who uniformly believe that everyone wearing stripes is out to get their team. Every penalty is wrong, and somehow, that really obvious hold your kid just did right in front of the official never happened. Ah, beautiful delusion.
My first full-time job was in Beatrice, Neb., where I covered small schools in Southeast Nebraska. Football in Nebraska is like basketball in Indiana. It’s sacred. I got a chance to see Matt Davison play as a prep star in 1996, the same guy who a year later made the miraculous diving catch for Nebraska against Missouri in 1997 that eventually helped the Cornhuskers win a national title. I can say I watched him before he became that guy.
Maybe that’s part of it. We see greatness before it becomes great. We like to be the one who saw the budding star before everyone else did. Or maybe we all saw it coming and just enjoyed the ride with a particular player. Either way, there are endless possibilities.
It’s about hearing the bands, seeing the colors, hearing the chants and the whistles and watching the joy and the pain. It’s about halftime shows, the flag squad and homecoming. It’s about watching the smallest kid on the field flatten somebody. It’s about being awed by the freshman phenom who can play with the big boys.
It’s still warm out now, but eventually, the leaves will fall and the chill will return to the air. And then, the hits will seem a little harder, the quality will be a little better and games will be more meaningful.
I can’t believe it’s been 21 years since I played, and I feel like a kid every time I go to a game. I know many others feel the same. And perhaps that’s why high school football is so popular, and why I keep going back as a writer, and why the stands are often full on Friday nights.
It never gets old.
