Friday night high school football is coming soon

High school football is a fall sport that gets underway in North Carolina in the sweltering heat of summer. The season’s official kickoff is Friday, Aug. 23. Players and spectators alike need to hydrate…and then bask in the glow and glory of the traditions and rituals associated with Friday night high school football.

Life is too short to let the season pass you by. Hence, my plan was to wow readers with a scintillating column about the nostalgia associated with high school football. Research revealed, however, that barrels of ink have already been devoted to this topic. One of the foremost contributors is Bob Howell a columnist with The Auburn (Ala.) Villager.

Howell grew up in Geneva, Ala., located just north of the Florida border. He said that when the Geneva High School Panthers took the field, practically the entire student body of 390 kids (minus those suited up for the game or in the marching band), would be cheering in the stands as well as most of the other 4,610 people who lived in the town.

Howell is of the generation that listened on the radio in 1963 as The Beach Boys sang “Be True to Your School.” The tune describes what it was like to “be jacked on the football game”…and the school pride associated with letting “your colors fly.”

Four of the original members of The Beach Boys attended Hawthorne (Calif.) High School, so the song features an instrumental segment of the Hawthorne Cougars’ fight song (to the melody of “On, Wisconsin.”) Well, dagnabbit! The recording sounds identical to the Carteret County, N.C., Croatan Cougars’ fight song.

David Mekeel of the Reading (Pa.) Eagle also chimed in on this subject of high school football. He said: “The pounding of the drum line still elicits excitement and anticipation.” He said he still gets “way, way too excited” for Blue Streak football at Manheim Township High School in Lancaster County, Pa.

“The nostalgia has been palpable. I remember vividly being about 12 and having my parents drop me off at the game on a Friday night,” Mekeel wrote. “In retrospect, at the time ‘it was everything.’ It was the most important part of those fall weeks for me, and missing even one would have been devastating.”

“As I find myself back in that setting as an adult, it makes me smile to watch kids who seem to feel the same way.”

Nostalgia can strike one at any age. In 2016, Destiny Wright of Monroe, Ga., wrote an online essay for her Odyssey community network at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, while she was a college senior. “All my life, I have heard that high school…would be the best years of my life,” she said, and what she misses most are “Friday Night Lights.”

“I feel like ‘The Boys of Fall’ by Kenny Chesney was literally written for our little high school football team (the Purple Hurricanes). Every home game, we played this song over the loud speakers, and I kid you not, I got chills. Every time.”

“Some of my favorite high school memories revolved around those Friday nights spent with the whole town celebrating our love for football and our school,” she added.

Kenny Chesney recorded the song in 2010 for his own high school (as well as for Destiny Wright’s, of course.) Chesney was a small but speedy wide receiver (#7) for the Gibbs High School Eagles in Corrytown, Tenn., graduating in 1986.

One of “The Boys of Fall” songwriters was Casey Beathard. His own son, C. J. Beathard, has played football at every level. C. J. was a standout high school quarterback in Franklin, Tenn., playing for the Battle Ground Academy Wildcats. He went on to star as quarterback with the University of Iowa Hawkeyes and is now a member of the San Francisco 49ers in the National Football League.

Lyrics in “The Boys of Fall” link a lot of small communities – like Corrytown and Monroe…as well as places like Morehead City, Newport and Beaufort – during high school football season. Listen in:

When your back’s against the wall,

You mess with one man, you got us all.

The boys of fall.

In little towns like mine, that’s all they’ve got.

Newspaper clippings fill the coffee shops;

The old men will always think they know it all.

Young girls will dream about the boys of fall.

Hopes this makes you want to sing your own high school’s fight song.