High School Football

Soccer players at Howard County's Mount Hebron High School congregate before their matches, and they pray.The football coach at Baltimore County's Hereford High joins his team in a post-game huddle, where a player gives thanks to God.At Lake Clifton High, the football coach, who's also a deacon in an East Baltimore church, takes his ministry to the field. He leads his players in prayer both before and after games -- and vows to defy any judge who might try to silence him."Trouble will have to come," said coach James Monroe, saying he answers to an authority higher than any court.

Bill Casagrande's secret is out, and high school football in Maryland might be the better for it. His idea is growing as fast as the kids are.Finally, middle schoolers are getting the chance to do something Casagrande couldn't do as a youth in the Parkville area.In 1995, Casagrande founded the Mid-Atlantic Unlimited Youth Football Association with one team -- a 35-player squad for junior-high-aged youths too big to make teams in weight-restricted leagues.They faced any private school freshman-sophomore team that would play them, and now, five years later, there is an eight-team league for more than 200 players (grades 6 through 8)

Another season, another disaster in the Maryland state football playoffs for Anne Arundel County teams.With Annapolis losing in the Class 4A playoffs by 33-14 to High Point and Broadneck in Class 3A by 34-20 to Friendly, county teams made another fast exit.Anne Arundel County has won only three state titles -- Arundel (1975), Annapolis (1978) and North County (1994) -- since the state tournament began in 1974 with four teams in each class. This year's 0-2 leaves county teams with a cumulative 15-41 record.

MONTOURSVILLE, Pa. -- All day long, they came to the single-story stone schoolhouse. Some left in tears, but more seemed dazed.They came to face the most deflating in a string of tragedies this year in this Susquehanna Valley town. In Montoursville, they still talk of the third-grader killed by a school bus. They remember the high school senior who died in a car crash, and the student who committed suicide.And now, a jet goes down in a fireball and takes 16 students from the school's French club with it. Also on board for the ill-fated field trip are a teacher, her husband and three other adult chaperones.

Football players are sometimes saddled with a stereotype that casts them as unintelligent brutes whose only goals in life involve an oblong-shaped ball and a 100-yard field. But the Severna Park High School football team is out to change that image.Yesterday, 17 players read books to every class at Oak Hill Elementary School in Severna Park."It shows that we can read," said Chris Field, a junior tackle. "We're not just dumb football players."In each classroom, youngsters gathered around a player as he read stories about cat-chasing dogs and other animals.

The dilemma hits me immediately when I turn to the local sports section of Friday's paper. Listed under the schedule for the day's high school football games are Poly at Dunbar, 2: 30 p.m., and Gilman at City, slated for a 3: 45 p.m. start.What is a high school football fan to do? I dismiss thoughts of a plot by the coaches of these schools to deliberately drive me crazy with such a scheduling conflict and get down to business. Which game do I attend?Dunbar is a defending state champion and ranked No. 1 in the Baltimore area.

"These kids play hard and they win good," said John Etzel, whose love of football and children helps keep the game alive in North Carroll. "They don't lose so good," he said, laughing, "They're just like adults, I guess."Mr. Etzel has seen a lot of wins and losses. He and his two boys have made the football fly in North Carroll Recreation Council football for seven years.Now that his boys are beyond age 13, they've left the recreation council program to enter high school football."I started in 1988, and I know the football program was going strong before that," he recalls.

THANKSGIVING brings an end to the high school football season in Baltimore. But even the best city high school football teams of today can only look with envy on the won-lost record of the old City College teams from 1934 to 1941. Under legendary coach Harry Lawrence, Baltimore's City College varsity football team tallied a 54-game winning streak.That streak came to an unhappy end in the Orange Bowl on the unseasonably warm (even for Miami) Christmas night of 1941. The team had gone to Miami to defend (and extend)

EL PASO, Texas -- Her football spikes are two sizes too large, her pants sag at the thighs, and her helmet gives her fits when it digs into her pierced ears.But Denise Medina, wide receiver, has quickly absorbed an important rule of Texas high school foot- ball:Wear the waterproof mascara."The first practice, I just had on plain old regular mascara, and I started sweating," she said. "The mascara started to run into my eyes and it stung. I went home and told my mom, "Please, get me the waterproof mascara.

CLEMSON, S.C. -- Ratcliff Thomas swears he's not out to prove anything to all of the football programs that wouldn't take a chance on him in 1992.A freshman from Woodbridge, Va., Thomas has by default become the leader of Maryland's defense. With veterans around him falling to injuries, ineligibility and suspensions, Thomas has admirably plugged a hole at inside linebacker. When Maryland lines up against Clemson today (12:10 p.m.), he'll enter as the leading tackler on either side."I never imagined this," Thomas said.

As Wilde Lake football coach Doug DuVall guided his players through practice for the final time in his career yesterday, the 61-year-old with the jovial attitude and cherubic face went about his business as if it were any other day. Preparing his team for tonight's Class 3A state championship against Westlake at M&T Bank Stadium, DuVall was the picture of focus. Deep down, however, he was very aware of the occasion and the fact that the end of what has been a magical 36-year ride is near.

NFL Saints@Falcons 8:30 p.m. [ESPN] Just because these two teams have a combined eight wins doesn't mean there are no playoff implications. At 5-7, New Orleans still can cast a somewhat plausible eye on the last NFC wild-card spot. That's parity, NFL-style. And the NFL commands you to be in total agreement with it. High school football Alabama Class 6A championship 7 p.m. [Comcast SportsNet] It's a Spinal Tappian lesson: For high school football to become as big in Maryland as it is in the South, we need to go beyond just four classifications.

The Miami Northwestern Bulls answered a ton of questions Saturday night in an early-season nationally televised high school football showdown against Southlake Carroll of suburban Dallas. The Bulls, who held on to win a 29-21 thriller, overcame their best receiver suffering a bruised heel, a hostile crowd of more than 31,000 and the hype of a meeting between the country's presumed two best teams to end Carroll's 49-game winning streak. While the game's outcome supposedly answered whatever questions might have existed about who is the nation's No. 1 high school football team, there's still one question left to be answered, and it's a big one. Why, exactly, was this game played in the first place?

More than a year ago, when word trickled out that NBC was developing a television series based on H.G. Bissinger's famous book Friday Night Lights, I wasn't particularly excited. In fact, I was mildly annoyed. Friday Night Lights was published in 1991, and it's part of the reason you're reading these words right now. Bissinger's story - which was about friendship, excess, race, love, loss and hope in small-town, working-class America as much as it was about high school football - helped inspire me, and countless other wide-eyed dreamers like me, to write about sports for a living.

Two stories that slipped under the radar recently, one hopeful, one not so much, provide yet another window into the soul of where high school athletics are and where they might be headed. A new Iowa State University study of 251 Iowa high school football teams found that 9 percent of the linemen on those squads in the 2005 season had body mass indexes (or BMI) that could qualify as adult-class obesity, which suggests that we're willing to put our kids' health at risk earlier and earlier in the name of supposedly making them better.

PROLOGUE Next week, millions will tune in to the Super Bowl, attracted as much by an athletic contest as a spectacle saturated with glitz, glamour and excess. High school football is something strikingly different. Its stars are not supermen but teenagers with imperfect talents and loads of vulnerability. In Baltimore, on uneven fields often bracketed by rusty metal bleachers, a high school football game can reflect the aspirations of a community. It can change lives and, with the promise of an athletic scholarship, provide an escape route from neighborhoods beset by crime and poverty.

After six weekends of high school football under the lights and on state-of-the-art turf, the new field at Poly is a rousing success. The Ravens, who spearheaded the $1.25 million project -- and dug down for new uniforms and helmets last season -- have even more of a golden image around the city because of it, more for that than even for their 4-2 start. And, by comparison, the poor, losing, increasingly abandoned Orioles look even worse. It can't be put more plainly than Roger Wrenn, Poly's football coach and a longtime baseball coach in the city, puts it: "In all these years, the Orioles have never done a thing for us. Not that I know of. "But I shouldn't disparage the Orioles.

Understand this: Burke Magnus isn't responsible for the decline in civility in American society, for holes in the ozone layer or even for bathtub rings. And, as an ESPN executive in charge of programming on its college-oriented channel, Magnus shouldn't be called on the carpet for whatever wretched excess may come from regularly televising high school football games. As he sees it, he's only partially feeding a beast that has heretofore only been nibbling, but is munching and getting bigger with each passing day. "In today's world, the specialization of television, especially in sports, relative to sports programming, has gotten to the point where people are expecting this," said Magnus, vice president and general manager of ESPNU.

Football referees and other officials often draw criticism. It comes with the territory, and most who do the job know and understand that. But Marty Peters wants to try to reduce the amount of grief some local referees, linesmen and others must face. Peters, 48, has been an officiator for 14 years. He's officiated at high school and college games for several seasons but now is trying to give something back. The Annapolis resident is starting a program to teach recreation and high school football referees and other officials how to do their jobs better.

The Rose Bowl was remarkable for many reasons - Texas quarterback Vince Young's performance, the back-and-forth fourth quarter, the amount of talent on the field. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect was that Texas' victory gave the Longhorns their first national championship since Richard Nixon was president. I'm not here to throw cold water on their triumph. (As the husband of a Texas grad proud enough to fly a state flag out our window first thing Thursday morning, I wouldn't dare.