Jill's Journal: Football is big news in a small town
I’ve been standing on the sidelines of high school football games just shy of 40 years. There’s no way I can count the number of times that I’ve made a mad dash to keep from being pummeled by a kid running full steam with one mission in mind: To get that silly ball across the end zone line.
Last week, while paging through that week’s edition of the Rock County Star Herald, a paper that reports on the happenings of Beaver Creek, Hills, Minn., and a collective number of other small, rural communities that surround Luverne, a headline about the Hills-Beaver Creek Patriots football team’s win that brought back a whole lot of memories.
It was about mid-year in 1988 when I accepted the job as editor of the Hills Crescent. As a one-person news-feature-sports editorial staff, I lived and breathed all things Hills-Beaver Creek Patriots for eight years of my career.
This week’s headline, ‘Patriots beat Edgerton 41-6, keep Red Rock trophy in Hills’, made me think back to the era of Patriot football that had me traveling to nearly every corner of the state well into late November. All of those hours-long road trips ended with the school’s very first state 9-man football title.
A winning football team for any community is big news. But in small towns like Hills and Beaver Creek, a winning football team is big news. And it was.
At the start of the playoffs, we started selling “Good luck, Patriots” ads, and we continued to print them week after week after every win.
In that era, The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, which was positioned in the heart of Downtown Minneapolis, is where many a high school athlete in Minnesota likely played in the biggest games of their lives. The indoor option was welcomed by all, especially after moving the semifinals to the Metrodome. I’m here to tell you that standing on the sidelines in knee-deep snow in mid-November was surely no picnic.
The first time that I walked along the sidelines of the Metrodome, I remember feeling small. And the crowds that made the four-hour haul from Hills, Beaver Creek and Steen – although sizable for communities with far less than 1,000 residents each – looked just as small in the enormous setting.
And though our fan base certainly didn’t have the vocal power to be the “10th” player on the turf, I do remember they did their best to let the boys in blue know they were to cheer them on.
The 9-man game was always the first game of a full day of high school football semifinal and final games. That’s right, if your team won in the semifinals, you got another trip back to the big city to play for the hardware. Of course, as a 20-something-year-old, any reason to make treks to the Twin Cities was exciting.
The Patriots won their only state title in 1990. It was exciting game that ended in a 28-21 victory over Argyle. The boys in blue went far into the playoffs several more seasons in that era, and for eight of those seasons, I was proud to capture these moments in Patriot history in both words and pictures.
Twenty-five years later, I’m still on the sidelines, still capturing moments in pictures – thanks to Tom, he takes care of the words. And while my spirit wear has changed from blue and red to black and red, and the game from 9-man to 11-man, football in a small town – or even one our size – is still big news.
