Saturday, December 4, 2010

Go Tribe!

At 7:30 pm tonight, the South Bend High School team will square off with the team from Colfax to decide the state football championship in Class 2B. This marks the first time in the school's 100 year history that the football squad will play in the championship game. I'm sure it will be a stern test as the Colfax Bulldogs have 85 players, while the South Bend Indians field only 22.

Needless to say, I'm rooting for the hometown team. I've never attended one of their games and I only know a handful of the student athletes, but that's beside the point. In small towns across America, the town's school often serves as a focal point for the community's identity.

South Bend RARELY makes the nightly news in Seattle or Portland. About the only time we get a mention has to do with the weather. Since we frequently record the highest rainfall total or wind speed in the state on any given day, that seems to be our main claim to fame.

The year after I graduated high school, my alma mater completed a perfect season (33-0) and won the state championship in basketball. While it was certainly a big deal to those of us who attended or graduated from Center High School, it didn't monopolize the news in our fair city. That's because I grew up in Kansas City, MO, a metropolis of over 1 million souls in the metro area.

On the day our team won, I'm sure there were countless murders and serious crimes committed, political intrigue at city hall, numerous traffic accidents, and all the myriad things that occur in a large metro area. So, while Kansas City residents were proud that one of their schools won a state championship, there were plenty of other things to occupy their attention.

It's not that way at all in small towns like South Bend (population 1,700 or so). We haven't had a murder in town (or the surrounding area, for that matter) in several years and you can count the number of serious crimes committed per year on one hand. There's not much intrigue at City Hall because there's not much going on there. Serious traffic accidents occur only every now and then.

There are no TV or radio stations in our whole county. News comes by word of mouth or from our two crappy weekly newspapers. (Heck, we don't even have a stoplight here.) So, when our small high school football team goes to the Tacoma Dome to play for a state title, it's a BIG DEAL, whether you care one whit about football or not.

GO TRIBE!!!!!!!!!!

4 comments:

  1. I have read that people who read a lot of news and watch a lot of TV (and things like Law and Order) estimate crime rates much higher than they really are.

    But maybe the lack of media itself keeps the crime rate down!

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  2. Maybe times have changed. When I was growing up in KC, we averaged about one murder per day in the metro area (born out by statistics).

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  3. re: news
    "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."
    — Mark Twain

    re: small towns
    as an undergrad at wsu, i knew a lady who grew up in colfax. as i recall, she was one of about a dozen or less in her graduating class. i guess they've grown since then to have 85 football players now!

    in high school i had an internship working with engineers. one of them grew up in a small town in montana, where many high schools played 9 man football, because so many schools didn't have enough people to field an entire 11 man football team!

    sadly, many small schools are being consolidated into larger schools these days.

    --sgl

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  4. SGL,
    In Washington today, there are over 50 small high schools that play 8 man football. I recently read that in Texas over 200 schools have 8 man teams.

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