PEA RIDGE — I don’t know if something that happened 11 months ago could be considered to be in “the nick of time,” but the Multipurpose Athletic building on the Pea Ridge campus has turned out to be more of a blessing with each month that passes.
This week is the first official time for high school football to begin in earnest.
Lots of athletes, both boys and girls, have been putting in considerable time with off season drills, camps and weight lifting sessions.
Football boys have been engaged in Monday night 7 on 7 passing competitions for the past three weeks.
As long as I have been a fan of football, (since the seventh grade in 1966), I am aware that there is perhaps no sport as physically demanding as the initial weeks of a football season.
It comes in the hottest time of the year, with long practices usually twice a day until the beginning of the academic school year.
Back in the day, when high schoolers had those first few days of practice, I really don’t recall that the heat was all that much of a problem. The players were thirsty most of the time but got water during breaks.
Perhaps the biggest “advantage” that my generation had was that almost none of us lived in air conditioned houses. When it was 95 degrees outside, it was close to that in my room in the back of the house although I did have a nice fan that moved back and forth to move the air around.
Since we were always warm or hot in the summer, we drank lots and lots of water. Not because it was our favorite but that it was free. My mom kept a garden hose out in the yard but it wasn’t to water the lawn, it was to water the kids. Drinking sodas cost money, like 10 cents for a six-ounce bottle, and not that many of my friends drank that much. With lots of colas having a diuretic effect on people, kids that drank few cola drinks were better hydrated than kids who chugged a lot of them.
Fast forward to the 2000s, and the great majority of folks live in air conditioned houses. Instead of the little six-ounce bottles that I drank as a kid, 20-ounce bottles are available everywhere and most restaurants have an “all-youcan-drink” policy. With kids having little exposure to heat and humidity combined with the small amount of water most kids consume these days, there are a great many youths who are on a risky path to be involved in demanding outdoor sports in August.
Most folks know of the late Kendrick Fincher, a Rogers eighth-grade football player who died in his first week of football practice. Having just moved here from the northwestern part of the United States, Fincher had developed no tolerance for the heat and humidity associated with the early days of junior high football in Arkansas.
In those days, coaches were big on saying “suck it up,” “man up,” when players were feeling some distress.
As a result in this case, Fincher had a fatal heat stroke.
Since I had suffered a heat stroke myself, I know exactly what they feel like.
I ran an 8-mile practice run in August on a hilly course north of Searcy where I ran for Harding University’s cross country team. For whatever reason, I was pumped that day to be the first one in and I got there first in 48 minutes. It was 97 degrees that day with 95 percent humidity and I lost seven pounds of perspiration that afternoon. The last mile I was weaving all over the road (though I didn’t know it), and when I finished and stopped, it felt like millions if bugs were crawling all over my skin and I could not talk.
I was in a fog for a couple of hours and I couldn’t eatfor a couple of days. I did take some mineral and salt tablets and drank a prodigious amount of water. I wasn’t the same for a long time following that event.
I didn’t know until I was in a coaches’ clinic yearslater that I was most likely on the edge of buying the farm.
Like I intimated in my introduction, with the worst heat wave and drought in several decades bearing down on Benton County and most of Arkansas, our Pea Ridge Blackhawks are toiling away in the shade.
The new facility, while not bringing down the temperature much, does prevent direct sunlight from boring through our players. With plenty of water available and a capable trainer available to watch the boys, our ’Hawks are the best taken care of 4A boys’ team in the state. I really feel for the other coaches in the 4A-1 who have to deal with this record heat wave. There are lot of things that have to get done this week and the heat wave will prevent a lot of those things to takeplace.
Having the nice pro-turf indoors will prevent a lot injuries that other teams players will be getting while practicing on sunhardened ground. I’m sure the less dirty laundry generated by the clean indoor turf has made many a mom happy about that.
The 4A-1 league race
I mentioned earlier in my columns about my outlook for the 2012 football season. The top three teams to beat, in my opinion, are Ozark, Prairie Grove and Pea Ridge. We have the good fortune to be playing both the top contenders at home in the later part of the season. I just learned that Ozark and Prairie Grove will be opening play against each other, with the loser of that opening contest facing elimination from championship hopes whenit plays the ’Hawks.
It will most likely take three wins to get into the 2012 playoffs and four wins makes it a sure thing. With Pea Ridge having the potential of beating anyone on their schedule this year, the sky is the limit for these boys.
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Editor’s note: John McGee is an award-winning columnist and sports writer. He is the art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, coaches elementary track and writes a regular sports column for The Times. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].
Sports, Pages 8 on 08/01/2012