The disappearance of small-town football

On the 407th and final night of Lindsay Holy Family football, a mother bundled on the top bleacher looks out at the 35-yard line, where her son is writhing in pain.

At kickoff, Sherri Frisch had cheered so loud you could hear it across the field.

Now, seven minutes into the game, she doesn't say a word, waiting for No. 99 to move his left knee. Waiting for Ben to get off the cold grass.

The image at top is Highway 91 west of Lindsay, Neb. This was the view from Holy Family's bus en route to the Nebraska Panhandle. Photo by The World-Herald's Dirk Chatelain.

Sherri had grown up watching Holy Family football, like most parents on this sideline. She had hoped the school's last season, even if it was just six-man football, would satisfy her nostalgia.

One game they scored 91 — then served the opponents dinner, a Bulldog tradition. One game they played 6½ hours from home — the charter bus left Lindsay at 7 a.m. and returned after 1 a.m. The last home game, they honored the school's best teams — 52-year-olds wore their uniforms and told stories till the lights shut off.

But the finale is turning into a disaster. The Bulldogs, 6-1, are running out of players. They came to Newcastle with seven in uniform, including one emergency sub nursing an ankle. They're gonna need him.

Ben limps off the field, removes his helmet and sits. Sherri descends the five wooden bleachers and joins her husband at a rope line behind the bench.

There's more to it than that. For any sports fans out there, I'd highly recommend a great book by Montreal Canadiens' Hall of Fame goaltender Ken Dryden ... it's called Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada. It's obviously a book based on hockey, but that guy has some incredible insight into sports in general, and a lot of the themes of his books cut across all walks of life.

The story you see here about football in Nebraska is remarkably similar to the bleak picture Dryden was painting of small-town hockey across Canada in the late 1980s. The biggest factor behind all of this was very simply, and Dryden summed it up so perfectly that I pulled the book off my bookshelf so I can quote him right here:

The fact is that the province's 850 communities reflect Saskatchewan of another time. The size of a farm historically bears some relationship to the capacity of a family and its equipment to cope with it. The existence of a local town bears some relationship to the ability of local people to get access to its services. Technological advances have allowed farmers to handle larger farms with many fewer people and to travel greater distances to gain access to a town's services. As a result, farm families have gotten smaller, and many children who grow up extraneous to the needs of the farm move to the cities. This leaves many fewer people living in the same geographical area. Services that have sprung up to support these people -- car dealerships, banks, barber and beauty shops -- must, to survive, increase the size of the area in which they do business. This, of course, means an overlap with the services offered by other towns that also must extend their reach ... The simple fact of today is that, economically, Saskatchewan does not need all of its 850 communities.

Replace "Saskatchewan" with "Nebraska" and you have the exact same forces at work here in the U.S.

I don't think taxation has anything to do with it. If anything, many of these rural towns get far more in Federal money (directly and indirectly) than their citizens and businesses pay in Federal taxes.

I have a wealthy cousin who apparently tried to create a small town. I have no idea what he was thinking but it failed.

Towns in America tend to be organic in the sense that they sprang up where they were convenient. Railroads and water were major factors. The town where I grew up sprang up at the crossing of two railroads. Before long a grain mill sprang up along with a market, hardware etc. The town where I live now had a railroad and a river that was dammed to power a mill. My house sits on the site where the icehouse was when they cut ice out of the lake.
14 posted on 12/31/2013 6:25:09 PM PST by cripplecreek
Years ago Thomas Sowell’s annual list of recommended books included a trilogy by Daniel Boorstin entitled, “The Americans.” The first book was subtitled, “The Colonial Experience;” the second book was subtitled, The National Experience, and the last was subtitled “The Democratic Experience.”
I read all three from cover to cover, tho I didn’t initially find the last one - on the Twentieth Century - as appealing as the first two, which were most excellent.
I mention them because the second book of the trilogy, which I have provided an Amazon link to, discusses the topic of the development of the American West. The point I took away from it on the topic at hand was that people heading west were looking for the place to stake a claim which would appreciate rapidly in value, so they could settle up on their claim after 3 years, and have the option of “flipping,” as we now would call it, and moving on to repeat the process. But of course, the great problem one faced in doing that was to decide which of thousands of places on the map were not merely places on the map but places where commerce would develop and make your claim valuable.
Sitting at our computers in 2014, we have the bias that we can know that “of course” Chicago would grow into the biggest metropolis in the midwest, and “of course” St. Louis, Milwaukee, and any number of other places would become lesser large cities. And “of course” names on the map that we never heard of, either became backwaters or - as in the case of the “wealthy cousin” you mentioned - failed outright, or never actually were anything more than names on the map.

When your wealthy cousin undertook to develop a town, he did the things you saw, with bulldozers and construction contractors. But he also tried to convince other people of the correctness of his vision, and tried to get them to buy into the idea of “getting in on the ground floor.” Not enough of them bought - but that is hindsight. Your cousin was “the man who is actually in the arena,” as Theodore Roosevelt famously put it:

From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sarbonne:
There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

According to Boorstin, the way you wanted to operate when promoting a boom town was to first recruit two businesses to it:

a newspaper printer, and

a hotel proprietor.
Once you had a newspaper printer settled in your community, you had a propaganda organ which would promote your town - for the simple reason that the printer who settled there wanted his decision to locate there to be validated by having his newspaper be in a growing community. Printers were known to announce occurrences in their papers which had never actually gone through the formality of having actually taken place. After you had a newspaper and a hotel, and were on your way, the next thing you tried to promote in your town was the founding of a college. Again, at each step of the development those who had already “bought in” were on your side, all wanting the town to grow so that their own property values would appreciate.
As I said, the book is well worth a read. Lots of interesting stuff.

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