Northwest Arkansas — I have had the opportunity of attending basketball tournaments, some in the gyms of large 7A high schools, and some others in gyms belonging to the smaller sized schools of our fair state. It has always seemed kind of odd that the bigger the schools in a tournament, the smaller the crowd of supporters seems to be.
Most recently I made my way up to attend a game up in Washburn, Mo., between our Blackhawks and the host, Southwest Trojans.
Since I arrived a bit early, I had to wait awhile to get a seat as the game between Purdy and Billings (both Missouri schools) was still going on and there was a full house for that game.
The game finally ended with the Purdy faithful mostly leaving the gym (they lost) with a lot of the Billings fans sticking around to watch the finals and final awards presentations. I located a seat up pretty high up in the west bleachers, between folksfrom Pea Ridge and near other folks whom I eventually determined were Trojans fans. The place was pretty well packed.
Looking around the gym, you could see a lot more “gray heads” in the stands than you see at “bigger” school contests. You could also see a lot more camouflage worn, more folks in cowboy hats, and I am guessing that the percentage of extended family members attending games of participating athletes would be much higher than what you might experience at games in Bentonville or Rogers.
After the game got underway, there was always music played in the timeouts or the breaks. Music like “Cotton Eyed Joe” and “Rocky Top” were amongthe mostly country flavored selections, something I would expect you would never hear or experience at a big city school.
During the half-time break, the Southwest school folks hosted a game they called “What’s in your purse?” The game would start with the announcer asking the crowd if they had a particular item. If anyone did and they were the first to beat it down out of the bleachers and give it to the announcer, they were winners of a discount coupon or a gift card to some local business. Among the items asked for was a deer tag and a tube of chapstick.
There was one particular woman who made three trips to the floor only to be beaten out by someone a little quicker to the draw.
Again, this is something you wouldn’t ordinarily see take place at a “large” high basketball game, especially the last item when the prize was a $10 coupon for a new brassiere.
Throughout the game,while there may have been some boos (there were some strange calls by the officials both ways), the crowds were supportive and enthusiastic and, you would have to say, fairly sportsmanlike.
I stuck around a bit after the game and thought about the difference between attending (and teaching in) small and large schools. Up in the stands of most small school games, you’ll see uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, and friends of the players on the court. When you hear the players names being announced, the names sound familiar. You check in the lobby of the pictures of graduated classes, you see the threads of many family names stretching through a number of years.
As a Pea Ridge teacher, I see kids on the floor who were in my kindergarten art classes not that long ago (or so it seems). Now if I had taught in, say, a Rogers or Bentonville elementary school, chancesare that I would have never even heard of most of the players on the field or court.
There are a whole lot of people who live in Bentonville who weren’t born or raised there. With the employers that Bentonville has, I would bet that there are people who have moved there who have come from most of the states that make up America. Not that it is a bad thing, but it would mean that the extended families of these transplants are scattered in a lot of places. I have three sisters living in three states (none of them Arkansas) who are professionals in missile defense, senior accountant for oil firms and hospital transcribing, so never got to see my nieces or nephews participate in their school activities or sports.
There was a report released a few years ago revealing that over 80 percent of people in prison came from a large city or attended a large highschool. Conversely, over 75 percent of the nations top CEOs and leaders attended what could be described as small high schools. If you check out the biographies of the most influential Americans over the past 100 years (and I mean influential in a positive way), they came from small towns and schools.
I would suggest that if it weren’t for small towns, there wouldn’t even be an America, at least the kind of America that most of us want to live in. Attending small school basketball games gives me a feeling that our country would be a lot better off if all kids could attend a small high school. There are lots benefits of attending a small school, more than I could ever list in a column like this.
Small town America built America into what it became and I think it will be small town America that will save it, if indeed the events of the past few years can be reversed.
Sports, Pages 8 on 01/06/2010