Football is life in Texas

Phone | 903-885-8663

Email | dave@ssnewstelegram.com

I am in a fortunate position to be able to be a member of the Sulphur Springs Rotary Club and this past Thursday, our guest speaker was Sulphur Springs High School Varsity football coach, Greg Owens. I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him before, so this was nice, getting to hear him speak and meeting him at the same time.

Growing up in California and being major sports fan, I’d always read or heard about how football in Texas was huge, but I didn’t really grasp the enormity of that fact until I moved here. Well, I didn’t even have to actually move here, because I noticed it when I was driving from my previous home in North Carolina, coming here to interview a couple of years ago. As I was passing what I thought were major college football stadiums here in Texas, the thought ran through my head, “man, there’s a lot of college stadiums here.” It almost seemed like every town I passed had a college stadium. It wasn’t until after I really started looking at the names on these stadiums that I noticed they were high schools. I’ve lived in major cities in our country, Phoenix, San Diego and Los Angeles and until moving to Texas, I’d never seen high school stadiums that could seat 10,000 to 60,000 people, or had press boxes that looked like college stadiums, so I learned early on that “football is life” here in Texas.

I was really impressed with Coach Owens. Many of the things he said made me feel good about not only the state of our local high school team, but how he and his staff are more concerned about helping these boys become good, productive men. As the father of two daughters, that’s important to me. When he said he wants his players to be good men, good husbands, good sons, good fathers, it felt very genuine and not like a speech to a Rotary Club. But the thing that impressed me the most was when he pointed out that he and his staff notice that when a player isn’t behaving like they usually do, maybe the kid is sad or depressed. He said they like to try and find out if the young man has some issues at home or something like that, before coming down on him. I remember football coaches just yelling at everyone equally and not caring at all if you’re having problems at home or with your girlfriend. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a 59-year-old Chicago Bears fan, so I love the “Mike Ditka” style of coaching, but kids today aren’t like we were. Kids today are allowed to be sensitive, sometimes even ultra-sensitive. Parents from my generation didn’t really care of we were emotionally upset about school or a girlfriend. Hell, I’m laughing as I’m typing this remembering how my parents used to handle me being upset. “Hey Dave, get over it!” Yeah, that pretty much covered it. It may seem cruel and heartless to many young parents now, but in reality, it prepared me for the real world. You see, bosses and co-workers don’t really care if Becky broke up with you last night, rub some dirt on it and get your butt into work. So, I commend Coach Owens and his staff for being able to change coaching styles. I’m sure that was not how they were coached back in the day, and it shows they really care about molding these young men into productive members of society and hopefully bring home another state championship trophy in the process.

I haven’t gotten to see a game here in Texas as of yet. I moved here in December of 2019 and then Covid hit, and it cancelled pretty much every outdoor event Hopkins County normally holds. I’m excited about finally seeing some live games, even though I’m more of a baseball fan, but I do like football a lot. I have a tattoo of the Chicago Cubs on my left arm, which should explain just how much I love baseball and my Cubbies. (don’t even get me started on what happened at the trade deadline). I’m hoping on visiting all the local football stadiums this season and cheering on all of our local Hopkins County teams. The one thing I won’t do is pick a college team. There’s no way as an impartial newspaper publisher, I can pick between Texas and Texas A&M, you guys take that stuff really seriously here and I’m not that stupid.