Growing Up on the Gridiron

by Vicki Mayk

  Marc, Jamie, and Owen played for the North Parkland Athletic Association Buffaloes—named, no doubt, for the animals grazing placidly at the nearby Trexler Game Preserve. From their first season, Owen and Marc played the positions they would fill on football teams through high school and college. Marc played quarterback. In youth football, Jamie played tight end and backup quarterback. Owen almost naturally gravitated to defensive positions, playing linebacker and safety early on. “I just remember Owen being ready to hit someone from that first time he got a helmet on. That’s what he wanted,” Marc says.

  It was something he had in common with Jamie. “I just liked hitting people,” Jamie says.

  Not all young players come to the game ready to tackle or be tackled. Coaches working with new football players, regardless of the players’ ages, always needed to help boys overcome their fear of contact. In the age of the internet, articles with titles like “Overcoming Natural Fear of Contact” offered coaches tips to help their players become comfortable with the hits that define tackle football.3 Today, alternative ways of tackling, such as shoulder tackling, aim to minimize head injury, and training programs are offered to teach coaches how to implement them.4 Those alternatives weren’t practiced in 1997 when Owen and his teammates started playing the game.

  Owen didn’t need to overcome any reticence. He arrived ready to tackle and be tackled. Family and teammates remember his fearless play from an early age. The sound of helmets cracking punctuated practice.

  Despite the intensity of Owen’s play, it was Marc who was injured that first season. A teammate’s helmet caught his right hand—the one he used for throwing the football as quarterback—and by the end of the quarter, it had swelled to twice its size. Marc showed it to his coach, who squinted at it briefly, and declared, “Oh, you’re OK. Go back down there.” Marc finished practice, but he ended up with a broken hand that required a cast for more than six weeks. In addition to ending the football season, it cheated him out of the last weeks at the community pool at Neffs Valley Park.

  For most kids in North Parkland, the pool at Neffs was the center of summer activity. Tucked in a wooded area off of the Neffs Laurys Road, it was one of two pools providing relief from the summer heat. The Orchard View Swim Club, a private club, was favored by more affluent families. Orchard View families had to buy bonds to secure their places in the swim club, as well as pay annual dues. A high wooden fence assured their privacy. Neffs Valley Park was the community pool where anyone could swim by paying a one-time admission or buying a season pass for a modest fee. A chain-link fence surrounded the huge pool, and a locker room as well as a slightly dilapidated snack bar selling ice cream, candy, and bad pizza dominated one end. By late summer, the boys divided their time between football practices and hanging out at the pool. To lose time both at the pool and playing football was double punishment, but Marc took it with the easygoing attitude that he would display into adulthood, a smile always ready.

  His loss at quarterback also contributed to the Buffaloes losing the championship to their rivals from the South Parkland Athletic Association. The counterpart to the North Parkland league, it provided youth sports opportunities in the southern part of the sprawling Parkland School District. The sense of rivalry between North Parkland and South Parkland was shared by players and their parents, creating a kind of suburban civil war with victors claiming bragging rights.

  Mike Fay was one of those South Parkland rivals. But unlike Owen and Marc, he had not come willingly to the gridiron. A big kid who was overweight in elementary school, he often felt alone and isolated. He looked in the mirror, fixating on his ears that seemed big and floppy in the self-conscious assessment of a preadolescent. His father had bought him a pass to the Allentown Municipal Golf Course, and he spent hours golfing, strolling the greens, and feeling more at home there than he did anywhere else.

  “I just want to be a golfer,” Mike told his father when the question of playing a sport came up.

  “No, you’re going to play football,” his father told him.

  “But what about what I want?” Mike asked.

  “You can do what you want when you’re eighteen,” was the rejoinder.

  Although his father had never played, his two brothers, Joey and Anthony, nine and seven years older, respectively, had both been successful for Parkland as defensive backs. It was a daunting legacy for the youngest brother. Anthony set records at the high school for interceptions and punt returns. Joey went on to play for the US Naval Academy, while Anthony played for two years at the University of Pennsylvania before a career-ending ACL tear. Playing high school football was the goal for many of the boys in youth leagues—although only a handful would end up as starters. As Mike followed his brothers into the sport, his early playing years were marked by interruptions because of his size.

  Big for his age, Mike was often forced to “play up,” the term used for young players who had to be on teams with older boys because their size or weight prohibited them from playing with their friends. “So when I was in third grade, I could play with some fourth and fifth graders, because I was like ten pounds, twenty pounds heavier than normal people that were my age,” Mike says. He remembers he “maxed out” and had to wait until middle school to start playing again.

  “I was just this pudgy kid that wanted to play sports and stuff, and I wasn’t that cool,” he says. The culture at his school in South Parkland, where he lived, emphasized pursuits besides athletics. By the end of elementary school, the people around him were beginning to adopt the dress and attitudes of skater culture, the abbreviated term for skateboarders. He tried adopting the style of dress. “I was posing,” he says, recalling his discomfort. Looking at his peers, he would think, “You’ll see. I’ll be cool eventually.”

  Although he had resisted playing football, meeting boys like Owen Thomas and Marc Quilling as opponents gave him a glimpse of a community where he felt he might be able to fit in. He knew once they reached middle school, they would play together on a Parkland School District team. “I know those kids are up there and I think I’m like them. I think I’m like them,” he told himself. “I hope I am.”

  While Mike struggled to fit in, Owen often enjoyed being the center of attention at Schnecksville Elementary School. Teachers remembered him not as an athlete, but as a whip-smart student who was capable of working several grade levels ahead of his classmates in math. He also was at home performing in school assemblies, where he took on roles as diverse as the Big Bad Wolf and John Travolta wearing a white disco suit in Saturday Night Fever. In Cory Smull Hausman’s fifth-grade class, he entertained his classmates with impromptu dancing to the popular tune “Mambo Number Five.” But during those years, there was another side to the engaging boy. A tendency toward anger and aggression that worked to his advantage on the playing field sometimes posed problems in school. In second grade, he was asked to participate in an anger management class. His father recalled, “The guidance counselor said, ‘The only way we could get Owen to participate was if we told him, ‘We need you to participate to help other people.’ And that helped Owen to deal with his anger.”

  His desire to help his classmates manifested itself in other ways: fending off a bully on the playground to protect a female friend or championing an autistic boy on the school bus. As he grew older, it was reflected most profoundly in his role as team captain and in the team-first mentality he brought to the playing field.

  Boys playing youth football in the 1990s, focused on pursuing their passion on the field, weren’t likely to pay attention to two events that foreshadowed something that would define the future of their sport. Years later, the boys and their parents remember nothing about the events that first raised an issue that would become increasingly important for those who grew up on the gridiron. In March 1996, the year before Owen Thomas began playing football, brain specialists, team doctors, and trainers from across the Northeast gathered at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh for a meeting that was
billed as the first attempt to confront issues related to the diagnosis and treatment of sports-related concussions. A neurosurgeon named Joe Maroon, head of the neurosurgery department at Allegheny General Hospital, who volunteered his time consulting as the Pittsburgh Steelers’ brain specialist, had used his team connections to pull the meeting together. Physicians presenting at the event testified that players and coaches—not doctors—controlled when players return to a game after a concussion. Players freely admitted playing through pain. Their references to “having their bell rung” were matter-of-fact, reflecting an attitude in which hits to the head were considered a routine part of playing the game. It was no surprise to most attending the summit to learn that coaches resisted pulling valuable players from the lineup because of head trauma—a largely invisible injury.5

  The second event, on July 26, 1997, appeared completely unrelated to that 1996 conference in Pittsburgh. On that day, former Steeler center Mike Webster was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. By that time, Webster had been steadily falling apart, mentally and physically.

  His former quarterback, Terry Bradshaw, introduced him in Canton with words both passionate and heartfelt. Recalling what he had needed to help him do his job as quarterback, Bradshaw extolled the way that Webster had filled the role. “I said, ‘Give me a winner. Give me somebody I can count on,’” Bradshaw said, his voice rising. “Somebody that’ll tell me, ‘Terry, no, don’t run this play.’ Somebody who will help me get the team in line. Mike did it. Mike controlled it. We needed him. We used him. We leaned on him. He was our strength.”

  After the introduction, Webster’s rambling, Ritalin-fueled acceptance speech made it clear that Webster was seriously ill. As he spoke for twenty minutes, his words were often confused. There were moments of lucidity, among them Webster’s declaration, “You know, it’s painful to play football, obviously. It’s not fun out there being in two-a-day drills in the heat of summer and banging heads. It’s not a natural thing.”6

  Yet the experiences Webster cited in his speech were exactly those that drew thousands of boys to the game. Football was filled with rituals they equated with coming of age and growing into manhood. The boys longed to be part of the fraternity of young men who survived the drills in the heat, endured the banging heads, and savored victory on the field. And they were willing to do whatever was necessary to be part of it.

  CHAPTER 4

  IN THE MIDDLE

  AT FIRST BOB STECKEL thought he had imagined the sound. It was early on a stifling August morning—the first day of football camp at Orefield Middle School. The pungent smell of dozens of young sweating bodies lingered in the quiet locker room. Steckel, who coached at the middle school and freshman levels for Parkland for twenty-five years, knew it was too early for players to arrive. Yet there was no mistaking the sound: the impatient, staccato taps were the sound of football cleats against the locker room’s concrete floor. Looking out of his office to the cinderblock room lined with red metal lockers, he saw Owen sitting on a bench. He was dressed in full uniform with helmet and shoulder pads—apparently unaware that there would be no hitting during the first three days of practice.

  “Owen?”

  The preteen turned his blue eyes toward Steckel. “What, coach?”

  “We’re not hitting today.”

  The words had the effect of a pin popping a balloon. Owen seemed to deflate before him. His shoulders sagged as disappointment registered on every inch of his body. This day, long anticipated, was not going to offer immediate opportunities for the parts of the sport he most enjoyed.

  This encounter with Owen was the first glimpse of a player who had the attributes that Steckel says only those who are “genuine football players” possess. “There are kids who like the idea of playing football. They like the idea that they’re part of a team and that they’re wearing the uniform,” Steckel says. “But there’s the rare kid who loves all aspects of the game. He loves the physicality, he loves the camaraderie. He even loves the intellectual aspects, those X’s and O’s diagramming the plays. He’s emotional on the field.”

  From his earliest days, Owen Thomas was one of those players. It is why, years later, Steckel would refer to the team from those years, as “Owen’s team.”

  Another disappointment emerged for middle school players on the first day: practices would be held on the baseball field, not on the football field itself. Marc Quilling referred to the practice field as a dust bowl. “Except when it rained. Then it was mud,” he says. The boys, eager to graduate to the Trojans’ home turf, would have to wait for their first game on the field.

  Parkland High School’s football stadium sits perched on a hill overlooking Orefield Middle School. Students entering and exiting the building can look up and see the goalposts extending like fingers pointed toward the crisp, blue autumn sky. In fall 2000, seating was being expanded, making it appear even more imposing. As Owen and his friends entered the middle school, the stadium held a promise that their dream of playing high school football would soon be realized.

  Football stadiums are usually built close to a school district’s high school, a location that affirms the supremacy of the sport as the most valued of all extracurricular activities. In Parkland, its location next to one of the district’s two middle schools reflects the school district’s burgeoning expansion. As its population soared, a new high school was built to accommodate it, opening in 1999. The original high school, dating back to 1954, became a middle school for students in grades six, seven, and eight. As a result, younger boys already in love with the game of football passed the stadium every day as they entered and exited the school, a reminder that they were closer to becoming Parkland Trojans.1

  The allure of football for young athletes was strong in the years from 1990 to 2003. As Owen and his teammates grew from boyhood to adolescence, it was the most popular sport for high school boys across the United States. By the time Owen was playing football in middle school in fall 2002, interest in the sport showed no sign of diminishing, with the number of high school football players totaling 1,023,142. It would only keep growing, with the number reaching 1,105,583 by the time he was a senior in high school.2

  Mike Fay had anticipated being able to play on a team with players like Owen Thomas, Marc Quilling, and Jamie Pagliaro. In middle school, they transitioned from being rivals in youth football to teammates on the middle school squad. Other teammates—among them Mike Parkhill, Eric Rueda, Phil Bortz, and Hesham Abdelaal—joined them. Mike and other boys would be bused from Springhouse Middle School to practices in Orefield. For many of the eager seventh graders, their dedication and passion for the sport was stoked by the example set by older siblings. Mike’s brother Joey had played with Owen’s brother Matt on Parkland High School’s 1996 championship football team. “We saw us as continuing that legacy. We knew that we had to be top dogs, like they were,” Mike says. The boys never doubted that they would follow in their brothers’ footsteps.

  Playing in middle school meant the boys were beginning another, more serious level of play. The focus in the North and South Parkland youth leagues was developmental, emphasizing skill building. That changed as they entered middle school, when an emphasis was placed on preparing players for the physicality of the sport. A strength and conditioning program with weight lifting was introduced. Summer practices were more rigorous, and for the first time the boys were exposed to doubles—two practices, one in morning and one in afternoon. Some days found the boys doing bear crawls in hundred-degree heat. Crouching with arms extended, they placed their hands on the ground and, with knees bent, propelled themselves forward, alternating hands and feet like bruins moving through a forest. Sweat poured down their faces.

  Adapting to the tougher physical demands was not easy for some of the boys. The increased rigor in practice didn’t come naturally to Mike Fay. When the team first had to run laps during workouts, Mike stood on the sidelines and cried. “I can’t do it,” he said. His fa
ther, standing at the fence to watch his youngest son’s progress, added to the pressure. The summer heat at preseason practices also took its toll. Sometimes Mike vomited so much that coaches considered sending him to the hospital. On one occasion, Owen stood over him.

  “You’re letting the team down. You have to fight through this,” Owen cajoled him.

  “He had that sense that you had to fight through adversity,” says Mike, who was an offensive lineman. Owen espoused the kind of commitment that leads athletes to stay in the game after jarring impacts should sideline them. Researchers who have studied the incidence of concussions and other injuries in all sports note that many committed athletes continue playing after they are hurt. Playing through pain is a badge of honor among athletes of all ages, the sign of a competitor who is willing to risk personal well-being for the sake of winning. Although the mind-set has come under increasing criticism, especially for young athletes, it was an accepted sign of dedication and commitment nearly twenty years ago, when Owen and his friends first played football.

  Middle school also was the time when the boys began settling into the positions they would play for the rest of their careers. In seventh grade, Marc, already established as a quarterback in youth football, attended the fabled Curry Quarterback Camp in Berwick, Pennsylvania. Founded by the late coach George Curry—the winningest high school coach in Pennsylvania history, with 455 career wins—the camp has prepared many young quarterbacks for success. Going to the camp at age twelve, Marc was far from the youngest player there. Boys as young as nine go to the camp to be groomed to quarterback their teams. Attending such sports camps has become a significant part of youth sports in the United States. The one-day Curry camp costs a modest $50 to $603 per player, compared to $1,500 and more at weeklong camps that some young athletes attend.4 The pricey camps promise young players a boost to their skills in the coming season and hint at long-term payoffs in the form of college athletic scholarships.