Across the street from the location of the workshop, there was a field where the Pulaski County Youth Football League was practicing one evening. The coaches welcomed me onto the field, and gave me free reign to dash in and out between the players, shooting whatever I wanted. I was learning a new lens, so it was a great way to practice, but I didn’t nail as many shots as I would have liked.
The coaches were remarkably unguarded, and they didn’t hold back much with the players, who ranged from about 5- 14 (although a mom confessed to me that some families sneak kids who are still in preschool into the league). Over and over, I saw coaches get directly in the boys’ faces, screaming at them, sending them off to do drills, letting them know in uncertain terms when they had disappointed. At one point, a little boy was scolded for leaving to get an X-ray, and a second-grader was dispatched to Coaches’ truck to fetch his flask of whiskey!
If a coach were to treat a kid that way in the everybody-gets-a-trophy-because-we’re-all-winners-on-the-inside atmosphere of a Portland youth league, I suspect he’d be out of a job pretty quickly, but in Kentucky, moms stood on the sideline, watching approvingly. “The principal hates it when football season ends,” she told me, “She says discipline problems go way up!” And these boys, for whom football has always been not so much a part of life as a way of life, bore up under their coaches demands like, well, champions, sniffing back tears, enduring the cold, and going back to run the drills until they got them right.
I was a little taken aback by the harshness of both the practice, and the coaches’ behavior, but I could see how much of themselves they put into what they did, wearing out their voices, freezing their butts off. I could see that they worked at least as hard as their players, and that they really cared.
Youth League Football has everything a good story needs- tension, risk, drama, face-painted moms praying. It reveals so much of what is essential about small-town life, and I’m now completely obsessed with the pursuing this as a subject.
Distasteful as it is, it’s hard to talk football now- especially boys’ football- without Sandusky casting his long, dark shadow over the subject. But it’s made me think about how a seemingly fluffy can open a dialogue about more serious issues- about the trust we place in the people we revere, about how we teach boys to become men, about the terrible motives that can ‘kindness’ can hide, and the kindness that sometimes masquerades as cruelty.
