High school football

With high school football season in full swing around the country, it seems a good time to remember and to relish the role of high school football in my life, in my day.

My best memory of high school football was from November 1967, when our Eden junior varsity beat Alden, 6-0, for our only win of the season on the last day of our season. The most memorable point was my scoring the single touchdown, after being sent in as second-string quarterback after Gary Preischel completed a forty-year pass to Gary Kaliza late in the contest, putting the ball on the one-yard line. Coach Phil Roof grabbed me -- totally unexpectedly -- and sent me in to apparently finish the job. Gary Preischel must have been stunned and greatly disappointed to be called off the field. When I went into the huddle, calling the expected quarterback sneak, a beefy center, Dan Finger, said "follow me," and I did, following his block into the end zone for the winning and only score of the game and a great way to close an otherwise humdrum season. By the following fall I chose to play golf, and not endure the rigors of the preseason workouts and daily punishment from the practices through the season where I'd have little chance of playing as a junior on the varsity team where older brother Tom had been playing quarterback. He too left the squad after getting little playing time that same year. It would take all-conference star, younger brother Doug, to light up the field in fall 1969, after I left for college.

Even after quitting, I enjoyed the Saturday pageantry of the game, along with the one Friday night game we played each year at either Depew or Gowanda. This two opponents could not have been more different, as Depew was a suggest, suburban, heavily Polish, huge squad -- when we played them my JC year at Depew under the lights they must have had more than seventy players, with sets of eleven running practice plays before the game, more as an intimidation that as a pursuit of perfection -- whereas Gowanda was a rural tea, ten miles south of Eden, populated by some native Americans from the nearby reservation.

As a junior varsity player we played at 10:00 on Saturday mornings, away if the varsity would be playing at home and vice versa were the varsity an away game. That meant an early bus ride to make it to distant Grand Island, a week or two before the Alden game, and we played under light snowfall after 'dressing' in a chilly, old locker room. In this case, the dressing was limited. Most of us rode the bus in full uniform, sans helmet. Grand Island played a wide open offense and two basic plays, one of which included a halfback in motion who would cut back and block me as left linebacker as they would run a sweep to my side. I recall trying to convince Coach Roof to let us adjust to their overload, but he would have none of it. We lost. I believe we were held scoreless and Grand Island probably won 12-0.

Football season also conflicted with grape picking time, which was another story in itself, and one of those Saturdays when the varsity played anyway game, our local AFS chapter ran its pizza sale, where we delivered hundreds of pizzas assembled that morning in the high school cafeteria, on raised tables, then boxed and packed in station wagons to deliver to routes tested and assigned by Ed Lorenzi, the master logician. Once I was sent to North Collins, well outside our normal route, to try and expand our sales by forty or more.

While I miss all these warm memories, what really loses me today is how the high school football season has changed. In my day, we played eight games, with no playoffs. The first game was in late September, with the season ending with two games in November, just in time to change over to basketball practice over Thanksgiving. Pre-season workouts were limited to a few days before school started after Labor Day, followed by two or three weeks of practice before games commenced. I think we had a 21-day limit on training before the scheduled games. My JV year we even had a scrimmage against Royalton-Hartley, a team well outside our league and geographic region, but preparation was primarily drills after school and usually some two-a-days before school started. I'd go home in those mornings after practice, make lunch and make my way back for the second half of the practice. French fries in a large pot of oil was my favorite lunch.

My curmudgeonly attitude leads me to say how I wish it was today: First, high school football schedules and games would be better served by the schedule we followed, eight games and a late September start. State-wide playoffs are an unnecessary waste of time, attention, money and egos. Second, college football is much worse. Go back to the former league structures. Limit the number of regular season games to ten and the number of bowl games. No playoffs. No regular season games in August; very few in December. No more athletic scholarships and, for that matter, no more need-based aid and certainly no more loans to attend college; cut tuition by forty to sixty percent and enrollments by twenty percent at four-year colleges. Make college affordable without requiring loans or aid. And make college meaningful by establishing strong admissions requirements.

Let me stop here before I go full rant mode....