Our Boys

I loved this book. At first I was a little skeptical because I’m not much a sports reader, but a couple pages in I knew it was going to be a good story.

As I started reading the book I found myself comparing it to all the small town football movies I have seen. But the more I got into the more I began to understand this was a story way outside of any small town football movie I had ever seen. The story itself was so inspirational and to know that those boys worked so hard and wanted to make Smith Center football something more than just a sport. It was a lifetime to these boys. They grew up being trained to play high school football.

The most amazing part of this story to me was the coaches. Most football stories you hear talk about the mean aggressive coaches that use fear to inspire their players, but not the Smith Center coaches. There was one particular part in the book that just made me stop and say wow, these are amazing coaches. Coach Barta is remembering the game against Plainville. Smith Center beat Plainville by an amazing amount and instead of gloating about it and being proud of the blowout, Barta begins to feel embarrassed and guilty. He shared his feelings about wanting to win but not wanting to push it to a point where he embarrasses the other team. I went to Maize High School and any sport I played there was nothing more important to our coaches than winning and they would do anything and everything to make that happen. So to me the fact that this coach actually cared enough to feel that awful was just amazing to me.

Overall, I very much enjoyed this book and the lessons that it taught me and if someday it is put on the big screen you can bet you will see me there.