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| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | | Home » Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen | | | | | | | Description: | | An inspiring portrait of the extraordinary high-school football team whose quest for perfection sustains its hometown in the heartland The football team in Smith Center, Kansas, has won sixty-seven games in a row, the nation’s longest high-school winning streak. They have done so by embracing a philosophy of life taught by their legendary coach, Roger Barta: Respect each other, then learn to love each other and together we are champions.” But as they embarked on a quest for a fifth consecutive title in the fall of 2008, they faced a potentially destabilizing transition: the greatest senior class in school history had graduated, and Barta was contemplating retirement after three decades on the sidelines. In Smith Centerpopulation: 1,931this changing of the guard was seismic. Hours removed from the nearest city, the town revolves around our boys” in a way that goes to the heart of what America’s heartland is today. Joe Drape, a Kansas City native and an award-winning sportswriter for The New York Times, moved his family to Smith Center to discover what makes the team and the town an inspiration even to those who live hundreds of miles away. His stories of the coaches, players, and parents reveal a community fighting to hold on to a way of life that is rich in value, even as its economic fortunes decline. Drape’s moving portrait of Coach Barta and the impressive young men of Smith Center is sure to take its place among the more memorable American sports stories of recent years. | | | Features: | |
• ISBN13: 9780805088908
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Joe Drape | | Hardcover:
| 288 pages | | Publisher:
| Times Books | | Publication Date:
| August 18, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0805088903 | | Package Length:
| 8.4 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.8 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.9 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.9 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 66 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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 a great bookAug 25, 2010
I rarely leave reviews, but "Our Boys" is the best book on high school sports - and perhaps sports in general - that I have read in a long, long time. It's the antithesis of Friday Night Lights. If FNL was about a football obsessed community where winning was the be-all-end-all, "Our Boys" is a community where football is a means to a greater end: it's a means to raising good citizens and teaching good values, whether you win or lose. It's well-written, poignant and funny. It makes you want to move to a town like Smith Center (or at least spend a year there). And if you competed in high school sports, "Our Boys" should bring back some good memories.
A small Kansas townJun 21, 2010
This was a well written, heart warming story. It was about football, but it was also about the connections of coaches, players, and citizens. It shows the merits and rewards of a small town. Very good read.
Plains values and memories . . . thank youMar 05, 2010
Growing up in Phillipsburg Kansas, arch rival of Smith Center, I learned the value of a days hard work, trust in people, honesty, forgiveness, love and support of an entire community. That was many years ago but this book shows those values still exists and are as pure as ever.
Though I've been away for almost 30 years, this book brought me back to my old home in northwest Kansas where I was born, raised and played high school football during the '70s against the Redmen, Blue Jays and Eagles. It made me realize how much we all had in common and still do. I gave this book to my wife and teenage son and said "read this and you'll understand why I am who I am."
Read this book. You'll treasure the story. More than that you'll want to instill the ethics, values and love "our boys" and "our coaches" have.
 A team and a townFeb 21, 2010
This book is the chronicle of one season for a high school football team in a small town in western Kansas. While that may not sound too enticing to some readers, there's in fact quite a bit going on in this book that elevates it into the category of pretty darn good sports literature. Even readers who don't have much interest in football, or high schools, or even Kansas may find a lot to like here.
Smith Center sounds like a fairly average rural farming community. What makes them stand out, however, is the Redmen, their local high school football team. When New York Times reporter Joe Drape begins telling their story, the Redmen are preparing to begin a new season, one they hope will end with the team's winning its fifth consecutive state championship title and maintaining an undefeated streak lasting just as long. There's some question, though, whether the current crop of seniors are good enough, and unified enough, to maintain the standards set by their predecessors. Is this the year when everything goes bust?
Joe Drape tells a good story, one that reminded me more than once of Stefan Fatsis' Wild and Outside: How a Renegade Minor League Revived the Spirit of Baseball in America's Heartland about the impact of sports loyalties on small mid-western towns. "Our Boys" has that to an even greater extent, though, because the while the fabled Smith Center Redmen have a statewide reputation for fearsome football, they're still -- as Drape makes clear -- a bunch of kids. It'd be too easy to label this "a coming of age story," but there's certainly some of this here. It's also a look at the impact a good coach can have on a community, a school, and, again, a bunch of kids.
There are any number of ways a story could have gone adrift, and Drape has skillfully avoided them. There is a lot of football here, to be sure, but "Our Boys" is not a play-by-play almanac of practices and games. We get to know players, coaches, and families, but our look at them is respectful and appropriate, not voyeuristic. Best of all, perhaps, Drape resists the temptation to make "Our Boys" any sort of allegory about the crisis in family farming, the decline of the rural way of life, the tension between athletics and academics, or any of the other Big Issues you might expect a New York Times writer to flirt with. This is a story of a team and the community that surrounds and supports it. It's straightforward, well-written and insightful, and by the end of the season you might even find you have a bit of an emotional connection to the Redmen yourself. Nicely done.
Our Boys A Perfect SeasonFeb 21, 2010
Our Boys was a very good book. My husband and I both read it and when we started to read it we could hardly put it down. Growing up in Southwestern Kansas myself, it was very touching and down to earth.
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