Column: High school football; then and now
Retired superintendent Curt Dubost.
– I’ve just returned from a ten day fishing trip to Utah, Montana and Idaho with my adult sons and one of my grandsons. What a fantastic trip; I hope families are finding time this summer to spend together camping, fishing or whatever else is your family tradition to make memories your children and grandchildren will cherish always and carry on in the future. We passed through many towns, each of them (seemingly no matter how small) proudly featured prominently a high school football stadium declaring it was the home of the Grizzlies, the Badgers, the Pioneers, or whatever their local mascot. It was clear that these communities take immense pride in their local high school and especially its football team, particularly if the town was small enough to have only one high school. I thought of the movies “Hoosiers” and “The Last Picture Show.”
I hope those stadiums will soon be crowded on Friday nights as they carry on an American tradition that seems to be slipping away in many locales. Football season opens soon and I really hope our local football teams will play to big crowds, be it the Bearcats, Greyhounds, Eagles or Outlaws. In Paso we are fortunate to have a beautiful stadium named in honor of the Bearcats who lost their lives in WW2. Plans are underway to recognize more prominently those fallen patriots with a new monument at War Memorial.
The Bearcats are particularly deserving of the community’s support as Coach Carroll runs a class program with the primary goal of winning games, but win or lose being a program that builds young men of good character. Good sportsmanship and leadership are stressed, and I am always proud of the way the Bearcats represent Paso under Matt’s guidance. So many of our boys today need positive male role models.
Many of our young men, unfortunately, live without dads in the home. Additionally, the push to promote equity in representation for all has led many to accept the relegation of boys to the “back seat” as necessary “reverse” discrimination to atone for past privilege. As noted in previous columns and in the news, boys today often suffer from low self-esteem and reluctance to aspire to leadership roles. Perhaps this is part of the reason for the decline in high school football participation and attendance.
While in Montana we had lunch with the former basketball coach of another of my grandsons. He mentioned the going rate for college recruitment for high school or college transfer athletes in football and basketball is $100,000 per star, meaning a five-star high school senior is getting half a million to enroll, and $100,000 for a one-star recruit. How things have changed. Remember when Reggie Bush lost his Heisman (now reinstated) at USC over accepting relatively trivial gratuities? Just this week President Trump stepped in to try to address the current recruitment chaos.
This brought to mind the only other time I believe an American President intervened in college sports, which was Teddy Roosevelt in 1905. Ironically, it was the result of a dispute between the president and Charles Eliot, the president of his Alma mater, Harvard, and occurred just as TR was winning the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the war between Japan and Russia. Eliot was understandably distressed over the fact that nineteen young men had died nationwide as a result of college football injuries that year.
While facing intense opposition from both Boosters and the business office, as football was even then extremely popular and a huge moneymaker, Eliot sought to cancel college football permanently as being just too dangerous. TR called him and the president of Yale and others to the White House and convinced them to adopt new rules to make football safer. These new rules were opposed by many coaches as “sissifying” the game by including a line of scrimmage/neutral zone, ten yards not five for a first down, the forward pass, and protective gear. Obviously many more safety provisions have since been implemented as it is still a contact sport with at times serious injuries, but I’m glad we still look for more safety while not deciding to take the extreme measure of banning what is strictly voluntary participation,
TR was himself too slight of build to have played himself, but he did have a personal interest as his son was on the Harvard frosh team. He believed that football was a uniquely American game that taught young men to be tough, hard-nosed competitors and to rise to any challenge, saying in life as in football, “Don’t flinch, don’t fall, hit the line hard”.
Let’s get out this fall and support our young men and our local football teams.
– Former Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Curt Dubost
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