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 […]
Tag Archives | Jr. Bills
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 […]
Sibling rivalry
Late in the fourth quarter of the SLUH-DeSmet freshman game Oct. 11, Pete Klug (right), in at wide receiver for the Spartans, leaped, reached and hauled in a long pass near the SLUH 10-yard line. DeSmet, leading 30-16, had the game well in hand after putting up 23 unanswered points in the third quarter. Klug’s […]
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 […]
Air Force One
It’s not every day the President of the United States flies into town to see a freshman football game – especially your freshman football game. OK, so maybe that wasn’t the reason President Barack Obama was visiting St. Louis on Oct 4, 2011. Something about a $25,000 per person fundraiser at one of the stately […]
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 […]
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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