For the third year in a row now, my strapping cowboy of a husband has coached my son Bryce’s football team. I’ve written before about this relatively new phenomenon in our lives—the practices, the filling of the water bottles, the interpersonal ramifications of being both the wife of the coach and the mother of the player, the filling of the water bottles, and the filling of the water bottles.
Also, the filling of the water bottles.
Have I mentioned the filling of the water bottles?
Anyway, the above photo is from a special game we had Tuesday evening, but most all of our games are during the day on Saturday. Todd’s team plays first, Bryce’s team plays second…
And I sit in the press box of whatever small town stadium we’re in and meticulously videotape every single play of both games.
I am now no longer just the wife of the coach and the mother of a player…I am also the official shooter of game film, and it is not a job I take lightly. My husband, you see, approaches his coaching job as if he were leading an NFL team: He and his fellow coaches get together a day or two after each week’s game, watch and study the film, analyze the plays, detect weaknesses, and apply all that they learn in the practices that week. Then, the next Saturday, they play. And I film.
And I go ahead and eat a Frito Chili Pie while I’m at it.
I accidentally stumbled upon this new role in my life when the player whose mother had shot game film for the past two years didn’t play football this year. After helping Marlboro Man find a suitable camcorder (the mom had used her own), I offered to shoot the film on the first game this year to give him time to recruit someone else. That never happened, and in a bizarre turn of events, I have actually come to relish my new job as Team Videographer for the following reasons:
1. I get to sit in the press box. It’s out of the sun, and is usually a few degrees cooler. This is great for redhead types like me. We weren’t meant to be out there in the elements.
2. I have something to focus on. Being the wife of the coach and the mother of a player is inherently agonizing. I take on the burden of my husband’s coaching decisions, the burden of my son’ performance on the field, and the burden of the entire team’s overall physical and emotional well-being, and my nervous system is pushed to its limit. But when I shoot the games, I have a job to do. I’m forced to follow the action on the field by looking at a small 3-inch viewfinder, and I have to hold the camera steady or the game film will be no good. So sudden jerking movements or crazy body contortions—the kind I am inclined to do if I am a mere observer in the stands—are not an option.
3. I can eat all the Frito Chili Pies I want without making a scene. This is very important.
4. The company in the press box is…entertaining. At high school football games, where the stakes are a little higher (though it’s difficult for me to imagine higher stakes than the ones that exist with our games), I suppose the press box is full of adults who meticulously run the clock and announce the games. But at the games of these younger teams, it is customary for a local kid in the same general age group to do the announcing. I find this not just in our town, but in the towns of the other teams in our league; there’s usually some youngster—age 11 to 14—who parks himself at the mic and calls out the plays, the players, and the penalties.
The announcer for our team, a dude a little older than Bryce, is nothing short of remarkable. He has found his destiny in football announcing, and he does it with confidence and charm.
“And…he’s brought down in the backfield by A PACK OF HUSKIES!!!”
“And that will bring about a Husky FIRST DOWN AND TEN!!!!”
“He shakes one off…he shakes off another one…AND HE SHAKES OFF ANOTHER ONE!!!”
“And the quarterback keeper will punch it in for a HUSKIES SCORE!!!”
“He’s brought down by a whole HOST of Huskies!”
Again: He’s remarkable. And he has a pretty smart sidekick who helps him identify players and clarify penalties and calls before he announces them, and I think they need to take their act on the road.
But then there are the other characters in the press box. My younger son is one. His best friend Phillip (Hyacinth’s boy) is another. And there are a handful more. They come and go as they please, sometimes welcomed by the two boys doing the announcing, sometimes not, and every now and then a couple of giggly girls will dare stick their heads up in the press box and all the boys wig out, tell them there’s no more room, and talk for the next fifteen minutes about how much they hate girls. Then they talk about how beast the Broncos are (yes, ‘beast’ is now an adjective as well as a noun) and one of the kids tells a story about how his uncle caught a shark at the lake this summer and they all are too busy talking about how beast that is to realize there are no sharks in Oklahoma. Then one of them tells some other tall tale about how one of the Broncos running backs came to Pawhuska once because he wanted to lift weights with our high school players—and he waits until every single kid up there has the widest eyes possible before telling them he was kidding the whole time. Then they all talk about how beast that would be if it had really been true, and it goes on and on and on.
And all the while, I’m just sitting there on the other side of a partition, watching the game and diligently going about my work as a videographer…but being highly entertained by all the goings-on on the other side.
I like it in the press box. I think I’ll stay awhile.