High school football

NYT article on the popularity of high school alumni football:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/sports/clinging-to-youth-at-a-cost.html

Have any readers participated in this sort of thing?

Couldn't help thinking of this guy when reading the article:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmh5e-9bn8w

So apparently what Cato June has done with the Anacostia High School football program has caught some attention!  For those who have followed my posts over the past several months after Cato June took over, this will hopefully give you a glimpse into what he's done (with help from Walter Cross) with the program.  

''NFL Films Presents'' - Anacostia Revisited - A return trip to visit the Anacostia Indians, a high school team from Washington, D.C. with talented and motivational coaches.

The scheduled listings for the show are:

Tuesday, 12/4: ESPN2, 2:30 AM
Wednesday, 12/5: ESPN2, 3:30 PM

Friday, 12/7: NFL Network, 4:30 PM
Saturday, 12/8: NFL Network, 7:30 AM and 1:30 PM

Anacostia played for the DC public school championship on Thanksgiving day in the Turkey Bowl.  Despite their improvement this year, they were considered a big underdog.  Anacostia played a great game and found themselves with a 4th and goal on the oppenents 5 yard line in the 4th quarter down 12-6.  A pass play went just over the oustretched fingertips of the Anacostia receiver and Anacostia settled for the runnerup spot this year.

Cato June was voted coach of the year in DC.

Edit: Indeed, Walter Cross is the OC for Anacostia!

For the first time since 1995 (when Cato was playing for the team), Anacostia HS will be playing for the D.C. championship.  Anacostia won their semifinal matchup by way of forfeit last week (use of ineligible player).

Anacostia advances to the Turkey Bowl - to be played at Eastern High School (a block from RFK stadium) at 11am on Thanksgiving day.  They will play the local bully - Dunbar HS - for the championship.

For those who haven't been following my posts, Cato took over the coaching duties this season and turned around a team that had won only a single game over the past two years.  Let's hope they can finish this fantastic run.

This book is a few years old, published in 2008.  It seems like a pretty good book but from the amazon preview it looks like it is mainly about the 50s/60s not more recent. 

Has anyone read this book?  What are your thoughts and would you recommend it?

Link to amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Detroits-School-Football-Rivalries-Images/dp/0738561681

As a post-signing day bonus, I was invited to a preview of the Oscar-nominated documentary Undefeated, about the 2009 season of the Manassas Tigers, a downtrodden football program in North Memphis, one of those dying neighborhoods we know so well (the Big Plant closed and nothing came to take its place).  In the 100+ years of its existence, the team had never been in a play-off game.  In 2004, a man from a better neighorhood volunteers to coach, starting out with only 17 players, outdated equipment and no real budget.  To raise funds for the program, the team would accept invitations to bus out of town to let themselves be pummeled by larger, more successful programs in order to take home $3,000 or so for their empty coffers.

In 2009, a couple of Hollywood filmmakers read a story about one of the players.  They moved to Memphis for six months and filmed 500 hours of practices, games, and the lives outside of football.  The player they'd originally read about (the big OT nicely numbered 77* in the picture below) is only one of the stories they stumbled upon.  In the Q&A after the film, the filmmakers said they hadn't set out to make "a football film" and had intended to focus on education.  And they could never have expected the scenes that would unfold in those 500 hours of hanging around with the cameras rolling.  (They said that they would never have caught that footage without first establishing trust, and their fading into the background was helped by their small, un-Hollywoodish cameras.  Especially with kids now so used to phone-cameras everywhere.) 

I hate going to over-hyped films, because then I'm usually disappointed.  But for those of us who follow recruiting so closely and the dramas of the kids that might come, don't come, do come, some who leave or are asked to leave, about kids for whom football can be their only way out, and for those of us who hear about how certain coaches "touch" kids (in the Hoke-ish tradition) and anguish over how many strikes = out, this is a film well worth your time.   

*And yes, their colors are a kind of a blue and a kind of yellow, and that M on the yellowish pants looks slightly familiar at a distance and in the dim lighting, but there are greater reasons for seeing the film.  General release is posted as February 17.  Hope it comes to your neighbs.