I sat down on the aluminum bleachers Friday night for the home opener, lukewarm coffee in one hand and a program in the other, and before the kids had even finished stretching, the new end-zone jumbotron lit up with a 38-second spot for Heritage Ford. The truck on screen was bigger than my first apartment. The kicker was still on the sideline trying to find his tee.
This is what $412,000 buys you in our school district now. I know the number because the booster club put out a glossy fold-over flyer about it, and the flyer was sponsored too, by a real estate agent named Tasha who I have never met but whose face I have now seen approximately as many times as my own children’s.
Between every series of downs Friday, the screen cut to something. Third-and-long was brought to us by Pillar Mutual. Punts were sponsored by a sub shop called Hoagie Town that I am told is a chain. Halftime was “presented by” the same Ford dealer, which I guess is what naming rights look like when you don’t have enough names to go around. There is now a QR code on the field-level signage that goes directly to the booster club’s Venmo, and a man in a polo at the gate told me, without prompting, that I could “tap to give.”
Coach DiMaggio, who ran our program from ’71 to ’89 and once made me run a mile in cleats for chewing gum on the sideline, had exactly one piece of audio-visual equipment at his disposal: a scoreboard with bulbs that worked maybe sixty percent of the time and an air horn the assistant trainer kept in a duffel. If you wanted to know the score and the lights were out on the seven, you walked over and asked somebody. Nobody died. Nobody got a notification.
The booster president — a guy named Greg who sells industrial flooring and refers to the field as “our digital experience” — explained the math to anyone who’d listen. The board pays for itself in three seasons, he said. The advertisers love it. The kids love it. “It’s the same thing they see on Sundays.” Yeah, Greg, that’s the problem. The kids are sixteen. They are not supposed to see the same thing they see on Sundays. They are supposed to see two yards and a cloud of grass-clippings and a guy named Mr. Hennessey blowing a whistle.
Ray Kowalczyk called me Saturday morning from his porch in Mentor, Ohio, where his grandson’s high school just installed something called a “coaches’ tower” with WiFi and a dedicated film-review iPad station. Ray said the tower has a sponsor too. The sponsor is a chiropractor. “Duke,” he said, “there’s a chiropractor logo on the tower where the offensive coordinator stands.” I told him I’d seen worse. I had not seen worse. I just didn’t want him to feel alone.
The kids, for what it’s worth, played their hearts out. My grandson Wyatt caught a slant for nine yards and got up like he’d done it before, which he hadn’t. The quarterback is a junior with a decent arm and the kind of haircut you can only get if your mother drives you somewhere specific. They are not the problem. They never are. The kids show up and run the plays and shake hands with the other team’s kids afterward, and none of them asked for a fog machine.
I sat next to a man in section B named Marv who has been coming to home games since 1974 and was, on Friday, eating peanuts out of a paper bag like a civilized person. He watched the screen flash a spot for a regional bank, then a spot for the boosters, then a spot for Hoagie Town, and he turned to me and said, “Used to be you came to watch the game. Now the game’s a thing they put between the commercials.” Marv should be writing this column. Marv should be running the school district.
Denise is bringing chili to next week’s tailgate. She heard about the recipe on a podcast.