THE REPUBLIC OF FOOTBALL Legends of the Texas High School Game by Chad S. Conine

Anywhere football is played, Texas is the force to reckon with. Its powerhouse programs produce the best football players in America. In The Republic of Football, Chad S. Conine vividly captures Texas’s impact on the game with action-filled stories about
legendary high school players, coaches, and teams from around the state and across seven decades. 

 

Drawing on dozens of interviews, Conine offers rare glimpses of the early days of some of football’s biggest stars. He reveals that some players took time to achieve greatness—LaDainian Tomlinson wasn’t even the featured running back on his high school team until a breakthrough game in his senior season vaulted him to the highest level of the sport—while others, like Colt McCoy, showed their first flashes of brilliance in middle school. In telling these and many other stories of players and coaches, including Hayden Fry, Spike Dykes, Bob McQueen, Lovie Smith, Art Briles, Lawrence Elkins, Warren McVea, Ray Rhodes, Dat Nguyen, Zach Thomas, Drew Brees, and Adrian Peterson, Conine spotlights the decisive moments when players caught fire and teams such as Celina, Southlake Carroll, and Converse Judson turned into Texas dynasties.

Growing up in Texas and football being the King of Sports here, a football book based on Texas High School Football was something I just knew I had to read!  I love football, I always wanted to play football in my youth.  I envied the boys that were privileged to suit up on Friday nights.  My father and my brother as well as my husband were high school football players and God has blessed me with two sons, who I hope and pray love the game and play long enough to feel those Friday Night Lights.

Reading The Republic of Football was like watching a highlight reel of so many different eras of the game. The interviews and research put into the storytelling was captivating.  I felt like I was there on the sideline watching this all play out.  There was not one story in the book I did not like but I did have a few favorites.  Mexia 1968, Lubbock 1968 and Corpus Christ 1985 all struck a cord with me for different reasons.  Mexia, their story of brotherhood in spite of the segregation of the time was just amazing. Lubbock 1968, another integration story of a team lead by an amazing coach who “meshed them together” and made them champions. Their coach all these years later knew exactly where life took his players and still kept in touch with them.  Being from South Texas, I loved the Corpus Christi story because I can remember watching my home town team play Calallen as a little girl. Every story was inspiring, uplifting and told in a way that left goosebumps on my skin while reading.  The grace, beauty and camaraderie of the sport is evident in every story told.  No matter where life took these men or how high some of these players and coaches reached in the sport, they always seem to remember when they started to love the game of football and it was at their Texas high school playing under those hot Friday Night Lights. My only issue with this book is that there is no mention of high school football South of Corpus, there have been many great football players and coaches that have hailed from the Rio Grade Valley and I just wish some of them would have been mentioned in this book but maybe another time and another book.

 *Thank you Lone Star Book Tours and University of Texas Press for providing me with a copy of this book for an honest review.