Permian High School Football Pros

Little kids always want to make it to the pros, as they get older they narrow it down into smaller goals. I will never know what it’s like to go to a small town school; I graduated with a class of over 500. In this school of approximately 2,000 students, I can only imagine the pressure that was put on our football team when their season started to become a winning one. Odessa is a small town located in western Texas, home of the Permian Panthers. The Permian Panthers are only a high school football team, but the way the town acts you would think they were all going to receive major scholarships.

In 1988, sports writer H.G. ‘Buzz’ Bissinger traveled from Philadelphia to Odessa to record one season of Permian High School Football. In his non-fiction

The movie hinted at it, but the Bissinger dedicated almost two chapters on it. It was said that the stadium could fit almost 20,000 people. The book is vocal about the preference of the football players. It describes how the team’s SAT scores were terrible, but not many people seemed to mind including parents. James Miles writing teacher even said ‘football is all a kid like [Miles] has going for him (Bissinger).’ Billingsley had even said that school, to him, was only there to take up time between football games and for socializing (study guide). One of the people who did mind was the new principal Hugh Hayes. Hayes had wanted to makes changes to Permian’s educational system, but found he could not because of the town’s misplace priorities (Garber). Also budget-wise more was spent on the medical supplies for the football team than the entire English department. The football coaches even made more money then some of the actual teachers (Garber).

The Permian community put an immense amount of pressure on the players and the coaches to win. After one significant loss for sale signs littered the yard of head coach Gary Gaines. Also in the chapter The Watermelon Feed it is stated that some players ‘…played with broken limbs, vomiting was routine; other took shots of novocaine to mask the pain of their injuries (Bissinger).’ Winchell had the expectations of an entire community on his shoulders, all expecting nothing but victory. In

Despite the fact Wikipedia is not the most reliable source, I was shocked that who ever wrote the article decided to make the first section about football. Granted it was after the history, but it’s history was only one line. Included in this football section is a chart of head coaches and their records and playoff appearances. I chose to use two other high schools to compare the Wikipedia entries to, they were my high school, Connetqout High School, and my roommate’s, Barnstable High School. The Connetquot page was very short like Permian’s, but the entry on athletics, all of athletics, was only four lines long. Now though Connetquot might not be as decorated as Permian championship-wise, the team are still good. The page for Barnstable was longer then Permian’s and Connetquot’s combined. The athletics section though was only just about as long as Permian’s and it was not the sole focus of the article. This shows that the people of Odessa care more about their football team then any other aspect of the school, if they did not someone would has added more to the