Chad Conine Hits the Texas Football Trifecta

When it comes to sports, Texas more than earns its bragging rights. The Lone Star State has produced championship teams and legendary athletes not only in football, baseball, and basketball, but in dozens of other sports as well. Chad Conine has covered Texas sports for twenty years—everything from Tuesday night high school volleyball matches to

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Thanksgiving Day Dallas Cowboys games. His new book, Texas Sports: Unforgettable Stories for Every Day of the Year, celebrates more than a century of achievements in a day-by-day record of the people and events—both unforgettable and little-known—that have made Texas a powerhouse in the world of sports.

Chad recently braved an exhausting road trip around Texas in one weekend to cover the three pillars of football: high school Friday night lights, college game day, and the NFL. We asked him to report from the field. 

Chad Conine will be speaking and signing Texas Sports at BookPeople this Sunday, October 15th at 2 p.m. Don't miss it!

Dispatches from the Texas Football Trifecta Road Trip

The first thing I want you to know, dear reader, is that I didn’t decide to cover three different levels of football in three far-flung cities all in the same weekend as a publicity stunt. That would have been fun, possibly. Like a football version of “Amazing Race.”

But no, it wasn’t like that.

It was just the way the schedule worked out and I could see it coming a mile away, so I decided to make the most of it.

When I noticed Texas Tech was hosting an Oklahoma State team that was sure to be ranked on September 30, and the Dallas Cowboys, whom I’m covering full-time for the first time this season, was playing at noon on October 1, I knew it would be an active weekend. I figured The Sports Xchange, my usual freelancing gig for top 25 college football, would like me to cover the Red Raiders versus Oklahoma State and I consider Lubbock my territory and want to keep it. There was simply no reason to duck out of covering a high school game on Friday night, since the college game started at 7 on Saturday night, giving me plenty of time to make it from the Waco area to Lubbock. The real trick would be leaving Texas Tech’s Jones Stadium after midnight and arriving at Jerry World in Arlington, ideally by 11 a.m., while still finding time to sleep a little.

If anything, this trip was a good indication that I’m addicted to writing about football. I clearly can't say, “no.”

But luckily, my friend and fellow creative professional Jacob Robinson, couldn’t turn down the chance to go to three football games in a weekend either, so I had a good traveling buddy.

FRIDAY

5:30 p.m. – As I packed for the weekend, I looked into my closet and instead of picking out shirts to wear to the Saturday and Sunday games, I couldn’t help but ask myself “Am I crazy for doing this?”

I like to work long days and I like being up against a deadline. But when I finish doing those things, I like to wind down by drinking a beer and then having a good long sleep. That’s not how this weekend set up, though. But sometimes the fear of sleep deprivation is worse than sleep deprivation itself. So I gave myself a pep talk.

“Just give me 48 hours,” I told my psyche, “and then we can recover on Monday.”

8:05 p.m. – Tweeted: “Fairfield RB (Kadarrius) Walker kept his feet through the hole and sprung for a 41-yard TD. Eagles 14, China Spring 0. 10:08 2Q. #TribFridayNight.”

On the drive home on Sunday, as Jacob and I discussed our favorite plays from the weekend, I picked this one. I liked the combination of Walker finding his balance and realizing he had open field in front of him, plus the fact that it gave underdog Fairfield a two-touchdown lead early in the second quarter.

8:30 p.m. – It was homecoming at China Spring, which meant I had a couple of extra minutes during halftime to write up the first-half action. This is a unique function of my job on Friday nights. High school football halftime lasts 28 minutes, longer than college or the NFL. So I use that time by writing as much about the first half as possible. I think I could teach a journalism class on how well this works.

Also, if you think about it, covering high school football is the last real opportunity for sportswriters to be the ones to tell the reading audience what happened in a football game. Once you go up a level to college, every game is televised and all the highlights are available in the palms of our hands. So the men and women covering college and the NFL are trying to tell you more about a game you’ve already seen and digested, probably even by the time a game story hits the internet. But if you like high school football, then reading the Saturday morning paper is fun because you actually get to learn something about what happened on Friday night.

Q&A with The Republic of Football author

Anywhere football is played, Texas is the force to reckon with. Its powerhouse programs produce some of the best football players in America. In his new book The Republic of Football: Legends of the Texas High School Game, Chad Conine vividly captures Texas’s impact on the game

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with action-filled stories about legendary high school players, coaches, and teams from around the state and across seven decades.

Conine, a freelance sports journalist who has written for the Sports Xchange, Reuters, and Golf.com, among others, has been covering Texas high school and college football since the late 1990s. We asked him a couple of questions about the game, about his career writing about football, and some of the controversies surrounding America's most popular sport.

For those who never played high school football or never went to a game, can you tell them what they missed?

I think it’s like anything else, you get out of it what you put into it. If going to high school football games on Friday night is a priority for you, like it has been for me since I was in middle school, then you’re going to spend a lot of ordinary nights at high school football stadiums. But somewhere along the way, you’re going to get caught up in something that’s very exciting, something that can breathe life into a whole community. That’s what the stories in The Republic of Football tell more than anything. They’re all about the magic moments.

What makes high school football in Texas so special?

Building on my answer to the first question, when those lightning-in-a-bottle moments come along, it’s amazing to see how many people get caught up in the excitement of it all. Last December, when we gathered some of the photo and video material for the book, I sat in the stands at NRG Stadium for the Class 6A state title game and looked around at 30,000 people in the stands. That’s pretty amazing for starters. Then I think about some of the playoff games I’ve seen in late November or early December when two teams are playing and the combined enrollment at the schools is around 500 students. But there are 5,000 people in the stands. When they say that the last person to leave town has to turn out all the lights, it’s not really hyperbole.

The Republic of Football: Legends of the Texas High School Game from Jacob Kyle Robinson on Vimeo.

Of the many interviews you conducted for this book, which was the most surprising?

I was often surprised by how enthusiastically some of the big names responded to talking about their high school days. I’ll tell you one that surprised me in that it redirected my focus for a chapter. I interviewed Cory Redding at the Indianapolis Colts training camp in August of 2014. Cory was going into his 12th NFL season after being a star at Texas and Galena Park North Shore before that. He basically told me to write about Coach David Aymond and what he did at North Shore. I ended up not using much from that interview with Redding, but the chapter is revelatory because of how Aymond changed the culture at North Shore. Redding was intuitive and selfless enough to point me in that direction.

There are risks and rewards with football: kids learn teamwork and how to handle defeat. There are also some serious physical risks. Did your interviews reveal anything about how players, coaches, and families view the risks and rewards?

No. I want to write that without trying to mitigate it in any way because I’ve discovered a huge divide on this issue.