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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Center of attention
High school football is both brutal and beautiful, exhilarating and humiliating. For the moms. The players? They’d probably choose different adjectives. Now seven games into the season, there’s a motherhood of brotherhood that has evolved around SLUH football. At every game you’ll find 45 moms in various incarnations of Jr. Billiken apparel, proudly wearing our […]
Turning points
Sometimes you miss them, those moments in a game that become turning points. And sometimes, you don’t yet know how pivotal a key tackle, or a made-extra point, or a punt that pins the opponent down on the 1-yard will be until after all four quarters are played. And so at the start of the […]
The roster
Watching a freshman football game is like trying to keep track of fish in an aquarium. For five games now this season, I’ve watched the players run up, down, backward, forward, hither and yon on a 120 x 531/3 square-yard piece of grass, thrilled when they made a play and wondering why I kept forgetting […]
Bookends
St. Louis is unique in its plethora of private Catholic high schools. Dozens of them sprinkled throughout the metropolitan area, — all boys, all-girls, co-ed — each with their own traditions and persona and drawing students from an abundance of Catholic St. Louis families. That’s why “Where’d you go to high school?” is as ubiquitous […]
The toughest opponent
SLUH has, without question, one of the toughest prep schedules in the area. Among the opponents on the 10-game regular-season schedule are DeSmet, defending state champion Webster Groves and CBC — ranked No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, in last week’s St. Louis Post Dispatch prep football poll. And last weekend, hands-down, the season’s […]
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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