They turned off the lights at SLUH Stadium at approximately 10:15 p.m. Nov. 18, 2011, and just like that, The Season was over. SLUH had just suffered a painful state semifinal loss to CBC, 66-28. If you really want to read about it, St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Nate Latsch did a fine job recapturing the […]
About Leslie McCarthy
Leslie Gibson McCarthy saw her first live football game at the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Mo., an annual tilt between St. Louis area high school rivals CBC and St. Louis U. High. She remembers nothing about the game, other than the fact that she sat on the SLUH side and she spent a great deal of time wondering why they put a football field on a perfectly good baseball diamond. 35 years, one husband, two teenagers and a journalism career later, she views a football field as a thing of beauty, and now writes about everything from football to footwear as a former sportswriter and weekly lifestyle columnist for the suburban St. Louis South County Times. Follow the Season of her life here, and read her weekly column at www.southcountytimes.com.
SLUH Stadium
SLUH Stadium is arguably one of the more unique venues for high school sports in the St. Louis area. Nestled between the campuses of St. Louis University High School and the St. Louis Science Center, the stadium has a Nexturf field, a four-lane track, a nice little concession area and bleachers for 2,345. Yet it […]
The Ice Man Cometh
DeSmet’s Durron Neal is going to have a fine college career at the University of Oklahoma. Maybe even beyond NCAA Division I into the NFL. He’s that good. And on Nov. 11, 2011, in an epic game already being described as an instant “classic,” Durron Neal (right) very nearly pulled off a Missouri state Class […]
Friday Night
All this week, Friday Night seeps into every thought. Getting up in the morning and getting ready to leave the house. Driving in. Eating lunch. In the hallways. Driving home. At dinner. And that’s just the moms. The dads: They’ll never let on. And the boys, well, they’re as cool as can be, eating their […]
Eleventh game, twelfth night
On May 31, more than five months and a lifetime ago, the SLUH football team gathered on the archery fields in Forest Park for the first day of football camp — the first day, really, of The Season. A talented group of rising seniors and juniors were coming off a disappointing 4-6 2010 campaign knowing […]
The reunion
Family reunions, that’s what a lot of these games in The Season have been. Especially the conference games — it’s impossible to have hard feelings for any opponent in the Metro Catholic Conference because these boys are all our sons. Spent the Vianney game catching up with old friends the Drazens and Hollmans; did the […]
Red October, Blue October
Early in the 4th quarter of a tense, tightly played game — with the score tied 21-21 — SLUH quarterback Trevor McDonagh connected on a short pass from the SLUH 27-yard line to Cameron Stubbs (left), who caught it at the 35 with a Lindbergh defender right on him. Stubbs pivoted, then ran the opposite […]
A game for the ages
The first time SLUH quarterback Trevor McDonagh played at DeSmet’s Pierre LaBarge Stadium, the game didn’t go so well. McDonagh was a sophomore, making his varsity debut because SLUH senior quarterback Michael Riddering had broken his collarbone in the previous game. McDonagh’s first set of downs was a disaster: a sack, a missed throw and […]
Freshman finale
The record will say SLUH’s freshman football team finished at 4-5, a subpar season if you are simply looking at the record. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. The picture at left, a blocked extra point attempt by Hazelwood West, in the final game of their freshman season, tells the story: A hodgepodge […]
Tackling Virgil
This team is on a roll. Eight games into The Season, the Jr. Billikens are 5-3 and have won four in a row, including the Oct. 14 pasting of Mehlville. The game was over one minute, 32 seconds in, when Terek Hawkins (left) barreled in from the 3-yard line for his first of what would […]
Writing The Season
Seventeen years at The Sporting News, a national weekly sports magazine, should have prepared me for one year of covering HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL. But while the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern taught me the intracacies of story development, nothing I learned there prepared me for feeding, clothing and watering a 190-pound defensive end and a 130-pound wide receiver. So I'm writing about it -- and tweeting everything from how to stay awake when the spin cycle begins at midnight to watching your sons run onto a field on a golden, crisp fall evening.
Going Long
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