The Real Friday Night Lights...Pennsylvania High School Football

Two Fridays ago I went to check out the local high school, DuBois High, play a game against long-time rival Punxsutawney. Yes, you've heard of this town.*

Punxsutawney, or simply "Punxy" as it's called in these parts, is about 15 miles from DuBois, and is reached by way of a winding, two-lane highway through rolling hills and cornfields, making it a good 20 to 30 minute ride. The two towns have been rivals--at least in high school football--for years, but I'd heard that in the past five or 10 years the rivalry has tipped heavily in favor of DuBois. Some say this is because DuBois High has more students, about 1100 to Punxy's 800. Doesn't seem like that big of a difference, but who knows. I decided to find out for myself.

I went to the game partly in search of that excitement that surrounds central/western Pennsylvania High School Football, the kind of buzz and all-consuming small town attention that spawned books like Friday Night Lights (yes, it was a book first). This region has produced some of the all-time greatest football players like Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, and so on.

I also went partly as an attempt to be "part of the community," a concept which has never, EVER entered my mind before I tried to start a new life as a stranger in a small town. This kind of thing is important.

I also went as an anthropolical observer. You see, I hadn't been to a high school football game in ten years...since I was actually in high school. Even then I didn't go very much. I approached it as an assignment; get in, talk to the locals, assess the situation, report my findings.

So, after a full decade, I found myself shelling out $3 for a general admission ticket to a high school football game. The price may have gone up a dollar since I was 18. I splurged on a $1 program, and took some action on the $1 50/50 raffle, and as I lost myself in the streaming masses of fans and families behind the bleachers I realized...I had arrived.

There is a heightened level of excitement anywhere you have hundreds of teenagers in the same place. This is a phenomenon I'd totally forgotten about after living in a city where everyone seems to be aged 22 through 40. In this environment, however, the demographic was almost completely the opposite; everyone was either aged 0-18, or aged 40 and up. There were parents, grandparents, little brothers and sisters, and of course the hormone-crazed high schoolers all running around, playing grab-ass, painting their faces with the team colors, throwing water balloons, yelling, and generally acting like teenagers. Quite refreshing to watch, actually.

The DuBois mascot is the Beavers, and the Punxsutawney mascot is the Chucks (groundhog = woodchuck = chuck). If you ask me, it's the perfect Rodent v. Rodent matchup. I mean, Rat v. Mouse is a bit lopsided, so is Gopher v. Mole. Beaver v. Groundhog just seems so natural. Sadly for Punxy, every year the DuBois fans steal hundreds of those bright orange "Ground Chuck" stickers from the grocery store and stick them all over everything, mostly themselves, at the game. It's a cruel twist of Food Terminology and Mascot Fate. I suppose Punxy could counter-punch with "Skin the Beavers," or even "Trap the Beavers and create a continent-wide trading network dependent on a single, exhaustible resource and therefore insure the collapse of your hold on power, just like the French did in colonial North America," but there didn't seem to be a lot of that.

The scene was almost perfect; the families, the marching bands, the cheerleaders, the 50 cent hot-dogs, even the mascot "Chuck" waddling around on the sidelines...and of course the teenaged Gladiators battling it out under the lights.

Of course, yes, there was The Game. With all the activity around me, I almost forgot I'd gone to see a sporting event. I'd arrived back into that strange and somehow exciting place called "High School," and somehow, ten years later, I still felt that oddly thrilling feeling in my stomach. It was all familiar, and yet I was seeing it for the first time; like an alien gripped by Deja-Vu. That all of this revelry actually included a football game seemed to be a pleasant surprise.

The great thing about high school football is how close you can be to the game. You can literally watch from field-level, just yards or sometimes a few feet from the action. The "stadium" is one in name only. Fans either crowd into a huge bleacher, or circle around just outside the field, beyond the track that surrounds it. You can hear the players grunting, the pads crunching, you might even get beaned by a stray pass or kick if you don't watch out.

The play was not exactly impressive, as it often isn't at that level. DuBois dominated, but Punxy didn't have much of a team. There were a lot of pile-ups at the scrimmage line, a lot of three-and-outs, a lot of botched hand-offs and sacks. The only real yardage was made either when someone broke out on a run, or when there was an interception. DuBois seemed to have two kids who were the stand-out athletes, but Punxy didn't even seem to have one. Usually at that level there is one kid, the Man Among Boys, who by sheer gift of genetics seems to have the advantage and runs the show. That didn't seem to exist in this matchup.

One bright spot was when Punxy put in its sophomore back-up quarterback, Logan Weaver. Weighing in at 150lbs soaking wet, Weaver looked like a stick-figure as he lined up behind some of his somewhat-huskier brethren. However, this kid managed to rip-off three consecutive completions for about 70 yards, which was unfortunately followed by a turnover on downs. On the next series, he struck again with two quick completions, and then an INT. He may have played one more series, but he was soon back on the sidelines.

Otherwise, there wasn't a lot about the actual game to raise one's pulse. I left at the end of the 3rd quarter, after DuBois was up 28-0. The game finished-up 42-6.

So, I didn't uncover a hidden pool of hardscrabble football talent, tucked away in a remote nook of rural PA. But as I watched all of the proceedings, the commotion, energy, as I heard the jeers, the cheers, as I overheard conversations, I was plagued by one simple thought: the real drama in life happens in High School. Forget the so-called Real World.

So I thought about it. Has life EVER AGAIN been as exciting as it was when I was 15? When I had to sneak out of the house, when I had to be clandestine about everything? When all I wanted to do was find my own identity, but at the same time all I wanted was to be "cool"? When nothing made sense and I was pissed and nervous and confused as hell? When I had "crushes"?? I hate to say it but, except for my first few weeks of college, the answer is probably no.

There's nothing like doing things, feeling things, for the first time. Maybe the events meant less in the grand scheme, but they meant more because it was the first time of so many first times. That's reason enough to make sure you get some variety in your life. A change is as good as a vacation.

But I'm getting off The Point, whatever it was. This game was fun because I'd totally forgotten what innocent, good-spirited and clean FUN a high school football game could be. When I was in high school, I was either too self-conscious or too pre-occupied to enjoy them. But now, as man getting ready to wave goodbye to his 20s, I finally get it.

*(It's the home of the eponymous groundhog and the mystifying annual ceremony in which the little rodent is said to predict the end of winter or the coming of spring. It's a quiant little ville, much smaller than I'd imagined, especially given all the Hoop-Lah surrounding the Groundhog. As you might expect, there is a discernible "Groundhog Motif" throughout the town; there are human-sized, plastic statues of groundhogs in front of certain buildings. There is a restaurant called "Phil's" (Punxsutawney Phil is the name of the groundhog...sheesh), and various business have "groundhog" worked into their names. Otherwise, it's a pretty standard small PA town. )