HALIFAX, Pennsylvania — One of the common denominators in small towns across this country is that while the lives lived here are still filled with all of the stresses that exist elsewhere, they manage to navigate the stresses better because of their rootedness to place and connectivity to each other.
The other common denominators are faith, family, and Friday night high school football, in that order. All three serve as the fabric that binds them to each other and a sense of place that is more valuable to them than the tangible benefits that come from upward mobility.
If your town’s team is winning, well, that makes the Friday night tradition in high schools across the country obviously better. However, there is an argument to be made that how your children and community conduct themselves when losing reveals their character.
There is also an argument to be made that character is measured by your conduct in triumph toward your vanquished rivals when you are the winning team.
In particular, when the winning team is handing the other a whopping of a lifetime.
Two weeks ago, the local high school team, the Halifax Wildcats, met its Big Spring rivals out of Newville for one of the first games of the season. The Dauphin County school district here along the Susquehanna River is tiny, but locals will remind you that isn’t a bad thing.
Big Spring High School, of Cumberland County, is a little bit bigger than Halifax, but it’s still a very rural district mostly made up of blue-collar families. The coaches at the school are teachers or former teachers who live in the community.
For all of the small towns that make up the district, going to their games either at home or away isn’t just about the players themselves. The cheerleaders, marching bands, and student sections play integral parts in the whole experience.
Every week, the students organize a theme. It could be a white out or a maroon out, both of which are the school colors. At Halloween, they’ll wear costumes. They’ve even done generation themes with ‘60s or ‘70s attire. They are active, they work together, and their enthusiasm and school spirit is contagious and engages the community at large.
They sing the alma mater twice at the game, both before and after. No one has to be reminded to take off his or her hat or be quiet during the playing of the anthem, and everyone stands. Their sense of pride in their school and their community says much about not just them, but how they were raised.
It is a different look of America than we often see when we log on to social media or watch the network news.
All that said, when playing Halifax, it was clear from the first play of the game that Big Spring was going to have a very good first half, too good. By halftime, Big Spring was up 63-0.
That is when the magic of the team’s character started to unfold.
In Pennsylvania high school athletics, there is a mercy rule that if one team is up an extraordinary amount, it has to sub the starters with junior varsity members, which is what Big Spring did. The fans also joined in, cheering for the visiting Wildcats as well.
Even the Big Spring football players clapped when one of the Wildcats did something great — not because they don’t respect their ability to win, but because all of them realized how demoralizing it must be for these players to lose week after week by such a huge margin.
In the end, the Wildcats lost the game 63-13. It is the story behind that score that is the real winner. People from small towns take a beating every day from our cultural curators in the media, academia, corporations, government, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. They are viewed or portrayed by them as backward, uneducated, bigoted bumpkins whose choice to remain rooted rather than mobile has left them behind culturally and intellectually.
These cultural curators have replaced faith with climate activism, family with social media, and community football games with NFL teams that spend way too much time dividing us with two different national anthems and social justice messages scolding.
The thing is, people in places like Halifax or Newville have tuned them out. All you have to do is sit at one of their games and the evidence is all around you in their embrace of faith, family, and yes, Friday night football.
