Steins Blog: Was it really any different?

If you play football at Maryville High School, you are finishing up a summer of hard work. Every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, you would be up at the crack of dawn. You jump on your bike, get a ride with a friend who is old enough to drive or just get a ride from a parent and gather at Multi for an hour or so of organized weight lifting.

I played football in high school. My high school had one weight lifting bar with a few weights. It collected a lot of dust in the summer. That didn’t mean we weren’t just like the hard working football players at Maryville High School.

We would be up at the crack of dawn, sitting on our front step waiting for our ride. It might be a friend with a driver’s license or maybe our parents would get us to our form of weight room. That weight room was a hay field where the farmer had the option of setting the size of the bales of hay. We might even have to lift the 60 pound bales over our heads if we stacked them over five rows high.

The only difference is in our weight room, we had a farmer anxious to get his hay in the barn, not a coach anxious to make sure his players are strong enough to compete in the fall. Our weight session lasted all day.

The Maryville lifters might look for a protein shake after their lifting session. My teammates and I looked forward to a great lunch full of protein from the farmer’s wife. The Maryville football players might grab a Monster for an afternoon pick-me-up. Our favorite farmers had a Falstaff pick-me-up in the afternoon. Not all that different.

Even though my era is 50 years earlier, was it really that much different?

Then and now, baseball was the sport in season. Maybe there were some slight differences. The uniforms of the Clatonia Cardinals baseball team was a pair of jeans, a clean, white t-shirt and of course, our ever present Chuck Taylor tennis shoes.

The uniforms might be slightly different now. Sometimes you even might need two types of shoes; one for the turf fields and one for the natural grass. I never had that problem. My Chuck Taylors worked on any surface including creek beds when we seined for minnows or the bed of a trailer when we bailed hay.

Our little town had one baseball that took the place of several types of teams today. We played our normal rivals. There had to be at least five teams within 10 miles that were natural rivals. The baseball strongholds of Hallam and DeWitt were only seven miles away.

Sometimes we would gather in a car caravan to play in big baseball towns of Pickrell and Barneston that were way down by the Kansas border. We would even risk life and limb to drive gravel road to some church in the middle of nowhere to prove that you didn’t have to be a Lutheran to be a decent ball player.

Just like back in the 1960’s, there are plenty of the local rivals if you play in the city Little League Baseball Program. That’s what Sam did until this summer. He played on a travelling team that played in St. Joseph, Kansas City, and Overland Park, Kansas. It was almost like Barneston. Not that much difference.

Of course, every sport had to get their time and space during the summer. When my friends and I had exhausted ourselves with weight lifting for our football conditioning and tearing up the baseball diamonds, we might find time to shoot hoops.

Almost everyone had a basketball rim hanging somewhere on their property. If they were lucky, the rim might be on a hard surface, like a driveway. Some farm kids even had a basketball backboard and rim in their hay loft. No rain would stop them.

We would play endless games of horse or games to 10, each hoop counted one and you had to win by two. Sometimes we played big-city rules and used played make-it-take-it. If we had a few neighborhood kids show up, we could go two-on-two by the same rules.

Is that really so much different than playing in summer slams and team camps sponsored by several area schools?

It might seem a little different.

We did save our parents money. The shoe of choice for our basketball activities was shockingly, my Chuck Taylor tennis shoes.

Today’s youth need ankle braces with shoes big enough to fit the braces snuggly inside. They might be high-top, low-top or even mid-top. My Chuck Taylors were always high-top. Your ankles had to risk it without a brace.

There is one huge difference. I never had a chance to play on great high school teams. We were pretty average, maybe below-average in football, baseball and basketball. The Maryville boys’ coaches will welcome experienced teams returning, all with high expectations. I guess I just didn’t throw enough hay bales.