Friday Night Lights: A Town

I am a student at Coldwater High School. I recently read Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger in my Honors 11 English Class and I recommend you read it too. This book displays the pride, defeats, and brotherhood of a football team. This book is a thrilling book about Permian High School football team. In the story Bissinger talks about racism. In Odessa, Texas whites and blacks are separated by the railroad tracks. The author shows that the whites and blacks remain segregated besides on the…

In this book H.G. Bissinger tells the story of Odessa, a football obsessed Texas town, all the way back to its conception. In the book not only do we get a great picture of what the people of Odessa, and more specifically Permian High School are like, Bissinger does a great job of explaining the football obsession that plagues the town and the economic troubles and racial and political blunders that play into this town’s unhealthy lifestyle. This implied, and not straight to the point,…

Published in GQ in 1997, Elwood Reid’s “My Body, My Weapon, My Shame,” is a personal article that offers a behind-the-scenes account of college football. He describes his journey as a University of Michigan Wolverine, starting from his high school scouting days and ending with his retirement in Alaska. Reid recounts the strain he and his fellow players put on their bodies, both on and off the field, and explains the constant pressure to fulfill the image of a popular, powerful football player at…

John Grisham’s Bleachers captures the insight of American football in small town Messina. Every Friday night, Coach Eddie Rake and his Spartans storm the field preparing for battle. Anyone with a heartbeat attends the games. To the Spartans and their fans, the football field is a sanctuary and the bleachers are its pews. The Spartans are worshiped. They were given the special treatment and, “during the season, each football player could eat once per week at Renfrow’s at no charge” (Grisham 62).…

players to practice on ONE WEEK ! before their first home game!!!! It is especially demoralizing to the athletes who travel to other high school venues and find themselves on a varsity football field with adequate seating for the spectators and lights that can be necessary for the SAFETY OF THE PLAYERS !!!! Where supporters of the programs are able to generate revenue through…

Friday Night Lights Cheering, screaming, and parents coaching from the sidelines; this is only a portion of what goes on at a Friday night football game in Texas. Nothing can get a small Texas town more excited than going down to the local stadium to watch boys fight over a ball. From a Forney High School Highstepper’s perspective Friday nights are the highlights of their fall. Friday night lights bring frenzy and flurry to a small town. Before a football game, a stranger would think a…

Maryland, in the year 1984. I was a 15-year-old teenager growing up in Reisterstown, Maryland - a town about an hour away from Baltimore. I was just like any other red-blooded American male teenager growing up in 1980's America. I liked video games and Pac- Man, loved "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark", tried my hand at the Rubik's cube, and was concerned about the USSR and nuclear war. Oh yes, I,like millions of other teenagers loved good rock music and was just beginning to…

"Texas Forever" is a mantra Tim Riggins, the main character in the television series, Friday Night Lights, lives by. The premise of the show is how an entire town base their dreams on the game of football and we learn those dreams do not come without compromise. It is easy to identify with the characters in Friday Night Lights because their lives and their situations are believable. When we base our life upon a dream or the person we believe we deserve to be, it can be a tragedy or it can be…

Every Friday night at 7 a clock around eight to nine thousand people pile in to Salem Stadium. Salem prides itself on tradition and doing everything in a formal and old-school way which is why I think Salem is the perfect discourse community. Salem embodies everything a discourse community is and should be. For a city of 26,000 it may sound like a lot of people but it completely feels like a small town because everyone knows everybody. If you have ever seen the movie Friday Night Lights, you…

they do not exactly provide hope, but a false or temporary hope. People always know the game is going to have to end, but they still enjoy what they have left. In H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, there is a small town called Odessa that experiences this erroneous hope every friday night. It is known that the town has problems with the oil, crime and murder rates, but once you step into the stadium, all the problems just disappear.…