Though it was 27 years ago, this story still stings and it currently reverberates on the high school football field and education landscape of Arkansas. I started on the defensive line for three years at little Medicine Lodge, Kansas. Medicine Lodge is 100 miles from Anywhere, USA, that most Americans could point to on map… I love my hometown, and I feel just as connected to it when I return to visit my parents. The people of that town still have my back all these years later. Like most towns in Arkansas, it is a small town a long ways away from any bigger towns.
In his heartbreakingly simple song “Speed Trap Town,” contemporary southern sage and roots rock troubadour Jason Isbell sings of the small-town high school football effect: “It’s a boy’s last dream and man’s first loss.” To be young and perpetually hopeful only to eventually come face to face with defeat — this is the coming of age sports story we embrace here in Arkansas.
But what is a Friday autumn night without the bright lights of a football field beckoning us to remember those last dreams and first losses?
Early this spring, Chris Goering asked this very question on a social media post:
I started on the defensive line for three years at little Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and we improved each year, from 3-6 to 7-2 to an undefeated regular season my senior year, 9-0, before running into the private school bullies from Wichita: Wichita Collegiate. (Although they played in the same class as us, they could recruit from the huge city of Wichita and had at least 5 seniors on that team play major Division One football.) We played only with the players living in our small town and public school district. Though it was 27 years ago, this story still stings and it currently reverberates on the high school football field and education landscape of Arkansas.
Medicine Lodge is 100 miles from Anywhere, USA, that most Americans could point to on map. It’s a small agriculture-centered town that has largely stayed in the game all these years because there happened to be a large gypsum deposit nearby, which enables the town’s industry to make and ship wallboard all over the region from there. I love my hometown, and I feel just as connected to it when I return to visit my parents. The people of that town still have my back all these years later. Like most towns in Arkansas, it is a small town a long ways away from any bigger towns.
While I’d love to recount more stories from high school football, what I owe my hometown is to make sure that your kids will continue to be able to form productive identities in small town sports and extracurricular activities, to feel an entire community’s support at their backs in basketball gyms, at the softball diamond, and on the football field. Your kids deserve a chance to host a state playoff game where they cannot see past the people standing around the field and filling both sets of bleachers.
As a former high school (and college) football player turned teacher I believe that Governor Sanders’ new education plan poses a deep threat to all rural schools across the state. I want to preserve important opportunities for our kids and protect the small towns of America.
What the Governor is up to is pretty simple. She deeply wants to open school choice up to the state by adding vouchers for private schools now and create a free-for-all of charter schools later. The problem, as most of you who live in rural areas know, your towns don’t have access to private schools or charter schools, and losing even a few members of your schools to this competition could have disastrous effects.
Charters and private schools don’t outperform public schools, and they don’t often offer comprehensive extracurriculars or sports like football (typically), pathways for young people to be as connected to and as proud as I am of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, all these years later. These schools are not an improvement; they are a means of destroying your towns by taking the schools out at the knees, just as Wichita Collegiate did to us those years ago. They open up public school tax dollars that you and I pay to be wasted, as incidents around the country prove over and over.
With the LEARNS act, Governor Sanders is a 5-star athlete playing quarterback for Wichita Collegiate in 1995. She has all the power and all the advantages in the world on the football field, and she’s coming to your town to not only dash your dreams of holding your communities together but to beat you 42-7. The problem is that with the LEARNS act, not only will the things you love about your town be different, the foundation that the public school provides will be significantly compromised or reduced to rubble.
-Chris Goering, #73