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Friday Night Lights

Waiting all day for Friday night: up close and personal with high school football

David Sheehan visits Oscar Smith High to get a look at one of Virginia’s most successful schools.

COLLEGE AND HIGH-SCHOOL football in the US has long been a source of fascination for me.

It can be traced back to a trip down the West Coast in 2005, which resulted in lay-overs in hotels and motels of varying quality. The one thing they all had in common though, was each time I turned on the television in my room, college football dominated the sports channels.

At the time, the sight of 50,000 or 60,000 fans at a college game was something I found hard to get my head around. Looking at the statistics from 2012, the lowest average attendance in the top 30 was Ole Miss with 57,000. Michigan topped out that list with an astonishing average of 112,000.

Upon returning home after that trip, I didn’t think too much more about those games, but in the interim I read Buzz Bissenger’s excellent Friday Night Lights, which follows the fortunes of a Texas High School football team during their 1988 season. Both the book and, to a lesser extent, the TV show (which began in 2006) captured the importance of the High School team to the local community.

Friday night is the biggest night of the week in some towns in the US, especially if there is no nearby college or NFL team to support.

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So it was that when I planned a trip to Chesapeake, Virginia earlier this year to visit my sister and her husband, I inquired if there was a High School football team in the area that I could go and see play. Virginia Tech is one of the top-ranked colleges in the country, but is quite a distance away, so a High School game was more accessible. As luck would have it, my sister replied that she lived right around the corner from Oscar Smith High, who won the state championship in 2008 and 2011, and have won their district in every year since 2004. OSH is currently the number-one ranked school in the state of Virginia.

I had a look at the school’s roster online before booking flights to ensure they would be at home when I visited. I then contacted their coach, Rich Morgan, about the possibility of getting an interview with him before the game. “Always happy to help a fellow Irishman,” he replied.

When I arrived in Chesapeake, I soon realised how close my sister’s house was to the school. Drinking a beer on the patio on my first night, the Oscar Smith marching band could be heard practice their songs and routines across the fields. This carried on throughout the week for 2 hours at a time from about 4-6pm.

I had arranged the interview with Coach Morgan for 3pm on Thursday, the day before the game. Practice would be a lighter session than usual, from 4-5.15 he said, and I was welcome to stay and watch. Being a bit of a sports nerd, I was very excited by all this.

I entered the coach’s office to find 4 or 5 of his coaching team already present. One was sitting in a chair, feet on table, ball cap pulled over his eyes catching 40 winks before taking to the field. It was late-September in Chesapeake but temperatures were still in the high twenties. The reception was friendly. “Are you here to interview the coach?” I nodded. “He’ll be with you shortly.”

Coach Morgan entered seconds later, short and stocky with huge shoulders, sporting the championship rings he’d won since becoming Oscar Smith coach in 2004. Morgan inherited a team with no recent record of success, but managed to turn things around almost instantly – how did he go about making changes? He takes up the story;

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“Things got changed around pretty quick, but I think the biggest thing we had to do was change the culture and the mindset. It just seems like kids had gotten accustomed to doing their own thing and not performing at a high level. Average was good enough.

“We just had to change that. We are expecting perfection and championships, and if that doesn’t happen then it’s not good enough.

“The first year we went 7-3, then the following season we were 9-1, and from then on we’ve been winning championships.”

(For the record, there are 10 games in the regular season, with an additional 5 wins needed to ‘win state’.)

Was the turnaround based mainly on a change in the players collective attitude?

“I’d say attitude was the majority of it” says Morgan. “There’s always been athletes here, always been kids who can play, but their entire focus of where they wanted to be and where they wanted to go needed to be changed.”

The life of a coach in any sport is by its nature a transient one, but in a country the size of America, moving around it bound to be a huge upheaval. Morgan’s long stint at OSH owes much to his success, but I was keen to find out more about his past, and where he comes from.

“I’m originally from New York. I was a head coach in New York before I took this job, and I was an assistant coach down in Georgia which is about 8 hours south of here. So I had 7 years in Georgia, then a couple of years in New York.

“In both of those jobs I’d taken over teams who had been performing badly and turned them into play-off teams. So yeah, we’ve had experiences with knowing where a team is and where you gotta take ‘em to.”

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Beard-DeLong-Easley Field stadium, where OSH play their home games, is named after the three players from the school who have gone on to play in the NFL. With that in mind, the next question I put to Morgan concerned the players and their aspirations: does he see many players with the ability to go pro?

“There are an awful lot of variables — what college you choose, how your college career goes, whether you get hurt — there’s a whole lot of variables.

“I’ve seen kids come through from this area who have to talent to play in the NFL – and a number have – but there’s a whole lot of things that have to go right to be able to make that jump. So kids leave high school and I think ‘that’s the greatest player I ever saw’, but something happens and they fall by the wayside.

“Since I’ve been here we’ve had two that were brought into camp. One got cut because he had a heart condition, and the other guy just didn’t make the roster for whatever reason. He wasn’t the guy they were looking for.”

In terms of the ambitions and dreams of his players, does Morgan see kids whose only goal is to go pro?

“No, I think our kids are pretty focussed and grounded, and we’re pretty honest with them

“If you look at any kind of research, 0.01 percent of guys make it to the next level, and even if they do, the average career in the NFL is 2.5-3 years. What I always tell the kids is ‘when you’re 25 and you get cut from the NFL what are you gonna do then cos you’ve got another 50 years to live’, and their focus has to be on playing here, getting into college, getting as much scholarship money as they can and getting a good degree.

“If the NFL comes along then great, but if it doesn’t then they need to be thinking ‘what’s my life and my career gonna be?’”

Beard-DeLong-Easley Field is a 7,000 seater stadium that is pretty much full most weeks. Do the kids feel the pressure?

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“I don’t think our guys feel the pressure because they’ve been doing it for so long. I mean we were broadcast nationally on ESPN 2 weeks ago, so playing in front of 6,ooo people here in our back yard is nothing at all – they actually get excited about it.

“They enjoy the bright lights and the notoriety but that doesn’t affect them.

“But I can see that other schools coming here who aren’t used to playing in front of crowds get a little concerned about it.”

At the time of my chat with Morgan, the NFL’s concussion settlement had been in the news, and days before we spoke, a teenager in New York had died as a result of a head-on-head collision. Is concussion and head-trauma something that is front and centre in the minds of coaches now, especially at high school level?

“The concussions happen a lot. Actually the last time I checked soccer had more concussions than football.

“It’s unavoidable in a contact sport and some will succumb to those injuries. We (the coaches) have to undergo concussion training, the kids have to undergo concussion training, and they do concussion tests pre-season.

“So if anyone does get any kind of a blow to the head, we as coaches know what to do, the medical staff know what to do, and the kid himself recognises the signs because a lot of times it’s not the initial concussion, it’s going back too early to contact again.

“So we’re careful and well-educated on that, but the other thing is that a lot of concussions are caused by kids not knowing how to tackle, so we spend a lot of time teaching the fundamentals of how to tackle so that we’re not using any part of our head.

“We do all we can to reduce the risk of head collisions for both our kids and the opponent, and we’ve only had two concussions in the last eight years, so it’s not something that goes on all the time here.”

Given that these kids are full-time students, but with high standards to be met both in the classroom and on the field, how much training do they do?

“Official practice starts on 1 August (before the school term starts). We do two  sessions a day. We do two-and-a-half hours in the morning, we send the kids home for lunch, then we do two-and-a-half in the afternoon.

“That’s five hours a day in the month before school starts, we do that for three weeks.

“Then when school starts, we’ll go from 4-6.15 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Do about an hour on Thursday and then Friday is gameday.

“They get Saturdays and Sundays off, although the coaching staff will be in at the weekend preparing for the next opponent.

“It’s five days a week once a day when school is in, and it’s six days a week and twice a day before the school term starts.

“It’s intense, it’s demanding, but the kids know what to expect and they’re better off being with us five hours a day than being off doing God knows what.”

I recall Premier League players in England complaining in years gone by about foreign coaches imposing morning and afternoon training sessions on them, and here we have teenagers doing it without question. It speaks volumes about the level of commitment Morgan demands, and the level of commitment which is given by his players.

“It’s basically an eleven-month deal. You’re involved with football for eleven months out of the year.

“The state championship is 14 December, we give ‘em Christmas off, then we get them back into the weight room.

“Then we have Spring practice in May where we get everyone back out and get them ready for the next season. Summer time comes, we’re here for four nights a week running, lifting and practicing, and then when August first comes it’s back to two-a-day football until school starts.”

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There was a famous passage in Friday Night Lights when the coach, having lost a game, came home to find his lawn dotted with ‘For Sale’ signs, the locals’ not-so-subtle way of telling him he should move on. Has Morgan ever experienced anything like that?

“It’s not as unstable here as other places. There are places in Texas for example where a coach will sign a two-year deal, and if you haven’t done enough at the end of those two years – if you haven’t won a state championship – they can easily tell you to go.

“Here (in Chesapeake) a lot of it is tied to your teaching contract (Morgan doubles as a weights and PE teacher). Now if you weren’t achieving as a coach after seven or eight years they may get someone else, but it’s more stable here than in other parts of the country.

“But then we haven’t lost in seven years in the regular season!”

My last question concerned the star players on the OSH roster. Who should I look out for on Friday night? Who will go on to possibly have a big career in college or maybe even the NFL?

“Andrew Brown* is the number one rated tackle in the country. He’s had scholarship offers from every college in the country. He is the top defensive line in the United States.

“Josh Sweat is rated as the number two defensive end in the country for the class of 2015 – he’s only a junior, and our running-back Deshawn McClease is in the top 300 in the country and he’s a junior also.

Jaylen Bradshaw is our receiver and has already accepted a scholarship to Virginia Tech. Our quarter-back Shawn Mitchell is only a freshman [he is only 14], but he will have enough scholarship offers coming his way when the time comes.”

Morgan invited me to watch the Friday night action from the sideline where I saw a fired-up coach oversee a comfortable win. Since then Oscar Smith High have stormed to the state championship game with a 14-0 record. They play Centreville this Saturday attempting to make it a perfect 15-0 and win state once again.

It’s hard to see them being stopped.

*In recent days, Brown – who is 6’4 and 290 lbs – has been voted Gatorade National Player of the Year. With former winners including Peyton Manning and Emmitt Smith, Brown is clearly one to watch in the future.

David Sheehan blogs at The Sports Diaries.

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