One Town, One Team

Bruce Bertrand

Description

When third-year football coach Sherm Blaser walked into his first team meeting for the upcoming season he asked the team what their team goal should be for the upcoming season. The first hand that went up was that of senior defensive lineman Benten Hall, who suggested a winning season would be an appropriate team goal. A winning season might not seem like a lofty goal, but it is certainly a practical one. The previous year the Kavemen did go 5-4 but finished sixth in conference play and did not make the playoffs. Benten's sophmore and freshman years those varsity teams went a combined 7-12. In fact, since Benten and his fellow seniors on the team started the first grade eleven years ago the Kuna football teams have a combined record of forty-three wins and sixty-two losses. The football program has not won a conference championship since 1998 and has won just one playoff game this century!
Blaser was not seen as the savior of this program when he was hired two years before. Before coming to Kuna his record was 15- 21 at two previous schools. In his two previous years on the Kuna campus, his record was only 8-10. So how could this team, led by this coach, make it all the way to the state championship game?
Fortunately for me, my son Ryan, who was starting his fourth season as part of Sherm Blaser's coaching staff and was living with me as he was finishing his master's program in psychology, so I had a front-row seat to this amazing season.

Sujets

• Sport
• Sports collectifs
• Rugby & Football américain
• Sports
• Fútbol
• Recreation
• Football
• Rugby

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 26 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781728378312
• Langue: English

Extrait

ONE TOWN, ONE TEAM
 
 
 
BRUCE BERTRAND
 
 
 

 
 
AuthorHouse™
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Bloomington, IN 47403
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© 2023 Bruce Bertrand. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
Published by AuthorHouse  03/27/2023
 
ISBN: 978-1-7283-7830-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-7283-7832-9 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-7283-7831-2 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023901223
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Town—So What’s in a Name?
Chapter 2 The Team
Chapter 3 The Redemption Tour
Chapter 4 The New Schools
Chapter 5 The Dude
Chapter 6 The Catholic School
Chapter 7 The Have-Nots
Chapter 8 The Playoffs
Chapter 9 The Ride Home
Chapter 10 Sour Grapes
In Closing Some Final Thoughts
PREFACE
H ello, and greetings from Nampa, Idaho; Nampa is located about twenty-five miles from downtown Boise. But the story I tell does not happen here in Nampa but in Kuna, the town just east of Nampa, particularly at Kuna High School, about ten miles from our three-bedroom apartment. My name is Bruce Bertrand; I am sixty-five and have two sons, Mike, twenty-seven, and Ryan, twenty-four. The three of us have lived in this three-bedroom apartment in Nampa since February 2012, about eighteen months after their mom and I divorced. Mike will move out soon; he just got a job driving for Amazon. Ryan will probably be leaving at the end of the school year, as he is about to finish his second and final year of his master’s program in psychology, hoping to become a high school or junior high school counselor. So I am enjoying the time the three of us have together because I know it is coming to an end soon.
While Ryan was finishing his master’s program, he was also beginning his third season on the Kuna High School football coaching staff as the receivers’ and special team’s coach. This is the story of the 2019 football season and the Kuna Kavemen’s improbable and surprising run to the state championship game. While Ryan lived the story, I found myself living vicariously through him during these thrilling thirteen weeks of the football season. I will do my best to tell the story.
I know you probably think this is just another football story like the movie Remember the Titans , a film that starred Denzel Washington and was released on September 19, 2000, about a high school football season at a newly integrated school, T.C. Williams in Virginia. This is true to a certain degree, but unlike that film, this book is not “based on a true story.” While telling my story, I will not stray from the truth, as that movie did for dramatic effect. For example, the team travels to Gettysburg College for a training camp in that film. However, the early-morning run to Gettysburg National Cemetery never happened, nor did Coach Boone’s emotional speech. Also, in the movie, many of their games were very close, but this too was not true; the fact is, of their thirteen games that season, nine of those wins were shutouts, and the last shutout was in the state championship game, which T.C. Williams won 27–0, not on the last play of the game as was portrayed in the film. T.C. Williams was such a dominant team they finished the 1971 season ranked number two in the nation. Team cocaptain Gerry Bertier was involved in a car accident that paralyzed him. However, it was two weeks after the championship game, not the week before the game. And finally, Coach Yoast had four daughters, not just Sheryl.
Okay, so you may be thinking that you have read this book before, Friday Night Lights , the book by H.S. Bissinger and released in 1990, about a high school football team, Permian, from Odessa, Texas, and their 1988 football season. Bissinger’s book was also made into a movie in 2004 and a television series from 2006 through 2011. Like my book, this story is about a high school football season. A season played by high school athletes and played with a football on a football field, but that is where the comparisons come to a screeching halt. No one in their right mind will mistake high school football in Texas with high school football here in Idaho.
High school football in Texas is this country’s gold standard; there is something different about high school football in the Lone Star state. This reputation lured Bissinger from his home and job in Philadelphia to move his family to Odessa, Texas, to live in that community during the 1988 football season. No one is moving to Kuna, Idaho, or anywhere in Idaho to follow any football team. I lived here and did not consider doing this book until after the season.
Part of the reason high school football is successful and popular in Texas is the state’s population. Texas has a population of almost thirty million, second only to California in the country and about seventeen times the population of Idaho. It is not just the quantity of great high school players the state produces but also the amount of quality of players that Texas has. According to ESPN’s top three hundred high school football rankings for the class of 2020, forty-two of those top three hundred came from Texas, more than any other state. Seventeen of the top one hundred were also from the Lone Star state—again, more than any other state. Idaho had no players in the top one hundred or the top three hundred.
Another difference between my story and Friday Night Lights is the town or city where the campuses are located. Odessa, Texas, like Kuna, was established during the 1880s mainly because a local railroad company came to town. However, Kuna would grow slowly because the community primarily relied on agriculture as their primary source of income. Odessa would explode because of what was discovered beneath the soil of Odessa and neighboring Midland. In the 1920s, the Permian Basin was found. The Permian Basin is a geological formation named from the age of the rocks, from the geological period that preceded the largest mass extinction in the history of life. The Permian Basin is the source of the large oil and natural gas deposits that drive the region’s economy, which is where the high school got its name.
With the opening of the Penn Field in 1929, and the Cowden Field in 1930, oil became a significant draw for new residents. In 1925, the population was just 750; by 1930, it had risen to 5,000, and by 1940, the population had almost doubled to 9,573. Over the next two decades, the population continued to explode during the oil industry boom. In 1950, the population nearly tripled to 24,495, and by 1960, the population tripled again, to 80,338 people who then called Odessa home. The population would begin to level out. At the time of Bissinger’s book, in 1988, the population of Odessa was almost 90,000, and the high school enrollment was over 3,500. At the same time, the population of the entire town of Kuna was less than 2,000.
Just like the entire Treasure Valley, Kuna would experience their population growth early in the twenty-first century. Treasure Valley consists of the city of Boise and the seven cities, Eagle, Meridian, Nampa, Caldwell, Star, Middleton, and Kuna, which surround Boise. This century, the state of Idaho has been the fastest-growing state in the country, increasing in size by about 2 percent annually. The Treasure Valley is where most of these new Idahoans now call home.
Kuna is located about twenty miles southwest of Boise. Our family moved to Meridian, Idaho, located just north of Kuna, in 2005. At that time, the population of Kuna was just over 6,000. By 2010, the population had almost tripled to 15,000. At the time of the 2019 football season, the city’s population was nearly 24,000, and the enrollment of the high school, which opened at its current location in 2001 and was built to accommodate 1,100 students, now had close to 1,500 students walking through the hallways.
Another big difference between the two teams and their seasons was the expectation placed upon each team—or lack of expectation in the case of the Kuna football team. As with each football season for the past twenty-five years, Permian had great expectations. In 1965, the Panthers won their first of four state titles. Four other times, the Panthers made it to the state championship game. In 1972, the Panthers won the state title and were named the mythical national championship. The football stadium on the Permian campus holds almost twenty thousand fans and is always filled. This means that nearly the entire town of Kuna could fit in the stadium where the Permian Panthers play their football games. Texas high school football initially drew Bissinger to Texas, and these expectations and program history drew him specifically to Odessa.
By stark contrast, in 2019, the Kuna football team had few, if any, expectations. The Kavemen have won zero conference titles and only one playoff game this century. In the two seasons Ryan has been on the Kuna staff, their combined record is 8–10, and they did not make the playoffs in either season. In 2018, the previous year, the Kavemen finished sixth in their conference.