Tuesday Night Lights
I am the assistant coach of a middle school football team. I have been in the position for the past four years. It is a tremendous amount of fun, in part because we have been successful, but mostly because middle school kids are completely ridiculous. Once, one of our players explained his refusal to pounce on a fumble during a game by saying "I didn't wanna get my jersey dirty, Coach." Then there was the time when I watched a kid playing cornerback ask a kid playing wide receiver what his job was. The wide receiver responded with something close to "I don't know. Do you know if I'm offense or defense?" To which the cornerback responded with something close to "Man, I don't know that either. I think we do both." And then they did that. They both played offense and defense at the same time.
There's more and it's going to be a weekly thing at Grantland.I work at a large, predominantly Hispanic, Title I school in South Houston — which is just a nicer way of saying that historically it has not fielded especially triumphant football teams. I seem to remember attending one game in my first or second year teaching (I’m in my eighth year, total); we lost by such a great margin that it was summarized in the following day’s morning announcements as our school having had "a very successful halftime show at the game yesterday."
Since then, we’ve only grown stronger. Four years ago, our then–head coach left, opening up the spot to his assistant, who happens to be a goddamn football genius. He quickly made adjustments to shore up the defense (opting for a 3-4 set heavy on linebacker assaults, so as to flummox the opposition's wide runs, which I think is the only play that the other coaches in our zone are aware exists) and unbuckling the offense (we remain the only school in our zone that throws the ball). The seasons that followed:
2010 Season: My very first year. Our team went 4-0-2, winning the championship game by two points against School F, a predominantly black school that has averaged about 1,000 points per game for the last 10 years. I'm not sure if School F was more surprised that they lost or we were more surprised that we won, but I just know I ate, like, 30 cupcakes in the coaches office that night.
2011 Season: Our team was even more monumental. We went 6-0, throttling nearly everyone we played (only one team managed to score on us all season, and we outscored our final three opponents 91-0). We beat School F again in the final game, 19-0. That season, we were gifted a linebacker with a titanium skeleton, a quarterback that had traces of Zeus's blood in him, and a receiver that, to state it plainly, had Fuck You speed.
