om
HE SAID WHAT?!? The Sideline Experience Most high-school football writers spend their Friday nights pacing up and down the sidelines frantically keeping stats and play-by-play in order to piece together a hasty story on deadline as soon as the game ends. There’s something special about covering a game from the sideline — an experience unlike anything most fans or press-box-bound journalists ever get to have. Here are the top five reasons patrolling the sidelines is the best seat in the house, Five Senses Style: 1. See: Fans can see a receiver getting his head around, anticipating a ball lofted in his direction. What they can’t see are his pupils dilating, then focusing down to pinpricks as he watches the ball into his hands. 2. Hear: From the stands, you get the occasional sound of crunching impact when a linebacker slobberknocks an unsuspecting running back, but you miss the hooting and gasping of his awe-struck teammates on the sidelines. Or maybe you’re on the other sideline, where the coach opens a tirade on the lineman who missed the block that allowed his running back to be slobberknocked. 3. Smell: A few years ago we would have gone with the more mundane ‘freshcut grass’ line here, but with the proliferation Cal High coach Eric Billeci of turf fields, it just isn’t viable anymore. So. Hurm. How to say this delicately? Let’s just say personal hygiene isn’t the tippy-top priority for some of those lads. One word, boys: Deodorant. 4. Touch: For the record, sportswriters loathe broken plays. Especially the ones where the quarterback scrambles toward the sideline and half the defense follows him out of bounds — all of them heading directly at the aforemention sports writer. Ever take 300 pounds of pad-clad high school football players in the chest? ‘Ooof’ doesn’t quite cover it. 5. Taste: Right. We just got clobbered by the defensive backfield. We’re picking the black rubber bits out of our teeth. But something tastes like copper. Is that blood in our mouth? — Bill Kolb
“They’re like that 5-foot-4 guy who doesn’t realize he’s 5-4. They don’t know that they’re not supposed to beat teams. They don’t know which teams they’re supposed to respect or which teams they’re not supposed to have a chance against. These guys are just born fighters.” Concord High football coach Brian Hamilton on what he learned about the Minutemen as they went 4-1 over their first five games.
Hamilton with QB Ricky Lloyd Support Your Local Business • Say You Found Them In SportStars™
October 14, 2010
SportStars™
9