Fayetteville Football Senior Night Game was last night at Fayetteville High School. The Pirates hosted the Summers County Bobcats. It will be my last night shooting high school football for 2017. Rain was in the forecast. It was unusually warm. I dressed for cooler weather and was surprised at how warm it was well after the sun had set and rain was approaching.

I spent my Friday daylight hours kayaking the river, collecting photographs of the colorful leaves in the New River Gorge. Add on a football Friday Night and you’ve got a great photography day.

If Fayetteville doesn’t make the playoffs this year, it will likely be the last time these seniors ever suit up for a football game. I still remember being in the locker room my senior year and listening to our coach tell us that we need to recognize the importance of that moment.

You don’t think about that kind of thing until you’re older. Those memories get more and more valuable because they become further away. The stresses in life at that time, the things I was worried about, I don’t even remember. If I was upset with somebody, I don’t know now, but I do know that I’ll never get to be in that moment ever again and the truth is, we don’t really know how special an occasion is at that time.

It is entirely possible that I may never photograph a high school football game ever again. Hopefully not, but we never really know what the future holds. That might be one of the reasons why I’m a photographer. A picture lets us capture a moment in time that we will never see again. The styles of the clothes, the hair, the weather on that day, they all play a part in our memories and have a strong effect on our nostalgia.

Fayetteville’s head coach, Coach Moneypenny, approached me during the game. He says “You take 9000 pictures at every one of our games and I haven’t seen a single one.”

I laughed and said “Yeah, I wish I could take more.” I didn’t have the heart to sound patronizing to the head coach by saying “The best ones are in the newspaper and the rest of them are on the Register-Herald website.” Not cool.

Coach asks “You still live on the corner of Maple and Sarah?”

“How do you know where I live?” I didn’t even think he knew me at all.

“I’ve been tracking you for years.”

“Uh oh.” I semi-joked. Not sure what that means.

This town is even smaller than I thought.

Last night was homecoming for Oak Hill. You gotta love it. As I walked into the stadium and across the football field, the floats were lined up on the track, on display for all the fans and the community that wasn’t able to see them in the parade.

There’s something about the fall that brings that sense of nostalgia. The warm sun and the cool shade. The crisp, Autumn evenings. The scent of the trees as they loose their chlorophyl and begin to change color. The earth is more pungent. One thing I like about shooting football games in Fayette County, West Virginia, is that they still play football on natural grass. There’s nothing like the smell of the grass and the dirt below it this time of year.

The band marches onto the field and makes a hallway for the players to charge through on their way out on to the gridiron. Gridiron. What a great word. It sounds just as tough as football itself. When I was in New Zealand, the Kiwis all called American Football Gridiron, because, well for some odd reason they call soccer, football. Weird.

Football season makes me think of my coach, Coach Podlasiak. Plaz for short. Coach Plaz was awesome. That man had a greater effect on me than just football. Coaches tend to do that. They’re that adult, outside the family, who helps you learn stuff and apply discipline, yet, there’s a factor of friendship and respect that is unique to that relationship. Coach Plaz was also my track coach. Track was my other favorite sport. I was a pole vaulter. From my youth, growing up next to Capitol University, I used to watch the collegiate pole vaulters and I knew one day that I was going to do that.

These days there aren’t as many pole vaulters as there once was. My own alma matter, Bexley High School, doesn’t even have pole vault. Neither does Oak Hill. It’s sad. The remains of a pole vaulting program are still on the field of Oak Hill. That’s a disgrace. We used to haul our pole vault pits in and out of the shed every day because we didn’t have a cover to leave them out overnight. It made us stronger and better vaulters.

Back to the football game. I’m not really a sports reporter and I have to leave at halftime to get these pictures to the Beckley Register-Herald before 10PM. Unfortunately, it appeared like Princeton was going to run away with more than the ball. They were up 21-7 at the half.

Princeton didn’t just dominate the game, they dominated the stands. Their band was every bit as good as Bexley High School’s band, and we have a GOOD band. A band that’s a college-level marching band type band. Princeton’s band was that good too. They were playing Green Day’s “On Holiday!” I couldn’t believe it when I heard it. Cracks me up because when I was in the high school band, we played songs from my mom and dad’s generation. Oh goodness.

There is only one grand stand at Oak Hill, another cool thing about local, small-time football. When Princeton scored, it was every bit as loud as when Oak Hill scored. Between the cheerleaders, dance team and drill team, Princeton must have had 50 high school girls cheering on their team and doing coordinated dance routines while the band played. It was almost as if Oak Hill surrendered the “Home Team” advantage.

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Oak Hill hosted Mount View for the third week of High School football. It was a warm evening compared to last Friday’s chilly temperatures from the remnants of Hurricane Harvey. It’s weird that a hurricane coming from Texas can bring cooler temperatures up North but it did.

Oak Hill has a very impressive band and drill team plus cheer leaders and majorettes. In a county of small towns and small schools, it’s interesting to see the size of the football teams and bands and drill teams and cheerleaders fluctuate in size, strength, and ability.

Another interesting observation about West Virginia football is how far the teams will travel. Mount View traveled an hour and a half drive to get here. They had a large fan contingent too. I was impressed with how many fans made the drive.

One other thing about small school West Virginia football is that there oftentimes isn’t enough bleacher space for both sides of the field. So the away team’s fans will sit on the far end of the home team’s bleachers. It makes for an interesting sound of cheering for either team.

It’s a bummer these pictures have to be in to the Register-Herald by 10 pm. I wish I could have stayed for the whole game. This was a really good game. It was back and forth in the lead for the first half. Oak Hill came out strong with a touchdown, but then Mount View answered with two. Then Oak Hill scored. Then Mount View scored a touchdown. Mount View doesn’t have a field goal kicker so they went for two and got it both times. Oak Hill answered with a safety to tie it up at the half.

I’d say the energy of the fans rooting for their teams has got to be the best part about high school football. It’s really got a special feel to it. These are people’s kids and their friends and their friends’ kids and people they all grew up with. It’s neighborhoods of friends and neighbors and people they’ve seen around town their whole life. It’s bigger than just the game of football.

 

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