The Old Home of the Edna Cowboys
What it was like to play at the old stadium.
The home games happened down by the junior high, boxed in by West Gayle, Gilbert Street, and Edna Junior High School itself. There was no parking lot, so if you were coming to the game you found a spot along the road or down one of the neighborhood streets and walked in, same as your dad had, and same as his dad before him.
There was no track around the field either, so the concrete bleachers sat right up close to it, closer than you'll find almost anywhere today, close enough that the town wasn't so much watching the game as sitting in it. The home side got the concrete, worn smooth by thirty years of Friday nights. Across the way, the visitors got plain metal stands. You could always tell whose house it was.
The field itself was Bermuda grass, and it was a nice field to play on, which is not the same thing as saying it was a nice field. It was soft, and it played good. It ran east to west, too, so the late sun set straight down the length of it, and the first quarter was half football and half squinting into the light.
It started up the road.
For the players, a home game didn't start at the field. It started in the high school locker room, where you'd dress out in everything but your shoulder pads and helmet. When everybody was ready, you boarded a school bus, and coach himself drove it down to the junior high.
Down at the field, the team filed into an old locker room under the home stands, and by old I mean old. Cramped, dim, a little rough. That's where coach gave his last instructions, and where you strapped on the pads and pulled on the helmet, shoulder to shoulder in a room about as close to holy ground as Edna got.
Warm-ups had their own rhythm. The team jogged down the sideline and across midfield, loosened up, ran a little offense, and the kickers and punters peeled off to get their legs right while the stands filled in behind them.
And then the town showed up.
It wasn't a stadium so much as a neighborhood with a football field in the middle of it. And on Friday nights, the whole neighborhood showed up.
Cars lined the Gilbert Street end, and the people who didn't make the bleachers watched from the fence and from the beds of their trucks.
The band sat across the way on the visitors' side, so when they struck up, the sound carried straight over the field and landed on the home crowd, which suited Edna just fine.
Then it was time to hit the Friday night lights.
The Cowboys came out from under the stands and walked the white shell path behind the bleachers down to the east end zone, forty pairs of cleats crunching the whole way.
Ask anybody who played down there. They'll tell you they can still hear it.
They didn't walk it alone, either. Parents and students lined up two deep along that path, slapping high fives, a human tunnel that ran all the way to the field. By the time a player stepped onto the grass, it felt like almost half the town had already touched him on the way in.