Acton Observer: Remembrance of touchdowns past
Ken Anderson recalls fond memories of middle school football, both as a player and as an advocate.
A recent middle school football scrimmage brought back many fond memories of my own playing days and my involvement with middle school football in the 1990s.
That night, my grandson Harry and I rode to the game in Burlington with his friend Ty Small and Ty’s grandfather. The anticipation in the back seat was palpable. I’d never witnessed such euphoria before (or after) any youth athletic competition — and that goes back to my first youth coaching experiences in the early 1980s.
Their excitement over the scrimmage drew me in. The varsity team was running and defending plays on the left side of the field while the junior varsity team ran and defended plays on the right.
That our JV team won and our grandsons scored several touchdowns — one on a flea-flicker pass from the grandson of one of my high school classmates — made it more fun. The elation lasted all the way home.
Staying together
Except for Little League, my own middle school football team, in the seventh grade, was my first official sports team and the first to play teams from other towns. Our team went 8-0 in the eighth grade under Coach Bob Seward and 10-0 in the ninth grade with Coach John O’Connell.
Our middle school football team was probably the last team to use the Acton Armory to shower and to dress for practice and games — except for the original Boston Patriots, who practiced on Emerson Playground in their team’s nascent days. After showering, we would get nickel Cokes out of a machine in the lobby and then sit on the porch to discuss football and girls.
The game kept us together through high school. Many of us were on the field when we beat Lexington on Thanksgiving Day, 8-0.
Football is hard but rewarding. Completing a season draws a team together in the moment and in years to come.
The smell of freshly mown grass on a late-summer day still takes me back to those double sessions on a worn-down natural grass football field in late August when the dirt and sweat covered us in a brown badge of courage.
Cultivating talent
By the 1990s, the number of people playing football in Acton had dwindled in the face of other organized youth sports, and it was no longer offered in the middle school. Acton-Carlisle High School had a hard time competing with schools that had youth football programs, whether interscholastic or Pop Warner.
Charlie Blair, a member of the School Committee, urged his colleagues to bring football back to the middle school so kids would get some pre-high school experience.
The committee voted in favor — but limited funding to the user fees paid by students to play an interscholastic sport.
Because that wouldn’t cover the budget, Friends of Football was resurrected to raise money. Work days were instituted, ad books — programs for the games — were created, and donations came in.
Middle school football was back.
Kindred spirit
Around that time, a classmate of my younger daughter — the boy weighed about 60 pounds — talked his hesitant mother into letting him play. Over the course of the season, he saw action, carrying the ball at least once and, on another occasion, intercepting a pass with a modest runback.
Post-season, some kids started giving the boy a hard time. A couple of his football teammates saw what was going on and came over to intervene. After a few words, the harassment ended.
That night, he asked his mother, “Do you know what football is?”
She said she didn’t.
“Football is family,” he said.
