They say no one ever remembers the scores of a high school football jamboree.
I say:
Jesuit 14, Green Oaks 0
Jesuit 14, Northwood 0
So much for that theory.
OK, so maybe I’m a little different. I remember my senior year high school jamboree pretty clearly all these years later and I’ll get to a couple of reasons why in a moment. (I also remember not getting on the field in my junior year jamboree, but that’s another story.)
You must know that it was a red-letter day for yours truly on that night. First of all, it was my 17th birthday, so I had my lists of potential R-rated movies already figured out.
Football fortune smiled on me that night as I threw for 103 yards and two touchdowns and ran for another in the two quarters combined. After that performance, I figured I might as well start leaving room for a patch on my letter jacket. Believe me, I ran the numbers on what that would mean over a full season.
To show how the football gods work, that turned out to be 103 yards more than I threw for combined in the next two weeks of the regular season.
The idea of what a football jamboree should be has long since left us. (“Good ol’ days alert!”) What it should be – and once was – is being able to buy a ticket, sit in the stands and watch a bunch of teams play.
In Caddo Parish, that would take place over two nights with two different formats, but the format for Day 1 was always the best: Six teams would play a quarter each. Team 1 would play Team 2, then Team 2 would play Team 3 and so on.
So every team would play back-to-back against a different team … except for Team 1, who would play, sit for two hours and then come back and play Team 6.
You didn’t want to be Team 1.
My senior year, we were Team 1.
There would be a short warmup for the “new” team between quarters and then it was time to tee it up for a quarter. No dancelines. No marching squads. No dramatic entrances through smoke-filled tunnels.
Get ’em out there and get it on.
In the 1970s, all of the Caddo Parish high schools participated, so you could see them all over two nights. Six would play that sort of round-robin the first night and the next night, the others would play the more common format of two teams against each other for a half (which is how Bossier Parish has done it for a few centuries.)
Either way, it worked.
Even though we were “Team 1,” we got a chance to sit in the stands and see what everybody else had and how we stacked up. No headphones, no mommies to come by and check and make sure our electrolytes were in proper order. We sat as a team and watched football at the north end of what is now Lee Hedges Stadium.
They stopped doing this format more for off-the-field reasons than anything else a couple of decades ago and it’s a shame. Newspaper estimates used to put the crowds at between 6-8,000 for these events. The proceeds would be divided among the schools for a nice source of revenue.
Some schools still do the play-in jamborees with a group of teams. But for the most part, it has disintegrated into two schools playing each other, often with a freshman jamboree followed by a JV jamboree and, if anybody is still awake, actual varsity football.
It’s a pretty forgettable night. (For most players.)
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com