Big City Voice For Small Town Story

Today I had the opportunity to hear Joe Drape (New York Times writer and author of “Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen,”) speak to a class I am taking at Wichita State.

If you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it. And if you are from a small town, it is a must read.

Drape talked about having the built-in story arc of the 2008 football season, but the football was only the spine to give shape to a story about raising children in a small town. Smith Center head coach Roger Barta has used the football team to build a culture of family in which seemingly everyone in town has a stake in.

Little traditions like the post game Circle Up, end of the year visits to the sixth grade class to get them excited about becoming Redmen in the upcoming year, and the introduction of a youth football program, amongst other things, have all led to a sense of togetherness within the community.

But maybe the most fascinating part of this story is Drape’s gradual integration into Smith Center. When he arrives, he is an outsider, who is more or less indifferent to the wins and losses, beyond what an average season would have done to the storyline.

In perhaps the most intense game of the season, a narrow early victory over Norton, Drape hadn’t been in town long enough to have any of the extreme blood pressure consequences a game like that can have on a fan.

But as the time passes, Drape becomes more and more personally invested. The town welcomes him in, and there is no escaping the fact that he becomes a part of the town as well.

He said he and his wife were on pins and needles watching games at the end of the season.

There was some apprehension from Barta from the beginning. He didn’t want some big city writer to come in and give him the “Friday Night Lights,” treatment. But Drape set out to write an anti-“Friday Night Lights.”

When Drape first came to Smith Center to do a story on the Redmens’ 72 points in the first quarter of a 2007 playoff game, he got a sense that the town was an example of what can happen when things are done the right way. This is the premise of the book.

It uses football as a vessel to show what the town has invested in the growth of its youth. Wins and losses are secondary to making the kids better people every day.

It is not a look into the negative, win at all costs, behaviors that have been used in so many football stories it is a cliché. It is a look at how the sport, and the support of a community, can bring out the best in people.