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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 Center—population: 1,931—this 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: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
| | | 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 59 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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 Football Story - Excellent; Human Story - Not So GreatJan 21, 2010
Joe Drape is an excellent sports writer. He knows football. He knows how to build excitement about football. When he writes about football, this book is an incredible page turner. The football portion of the book actually got my heart rate up, and I'm not much of a football fan.
But Joe Drape has a bit more trouble with the human side of the story. The book bogged down badly for me as he wrote about the personal lives of players, their parents, and the townspeople. He particularly lost my attention when he dove into farming and the high school education system in this small town. As I read the passages about these topics, I found myself wondering, where does this person live, what does he normally write about? For me the answer was, he's spent a very long time in New York City, insulated from the rest of the country and how life moves in rural Anytown USA; by far the largest portion of the country. He is an outsider to farming and secondary education, even though he grew up in Kansas City. Where he is an expert at football, he is a bad novice without good research on education and farming.
This is an amazing story and Joe Drape captures the meat and potatoes of the football season wonderfully. Coach Barta appears to be an amazing coach. The boys on this team play some incredible football. And the author captures all those things beautifully.
The other complaint I have about the book is the dialog, it is too clean and precise. It's very possible all the people in this book speak in clear, well constructed sentences, and never use any foul language or tell off color jokes. But the football players I've been around, even younger ones, don't talk like this. I've spent five years on the sidelines photographing High School and College football, and not one coach has ever spoken this precisely or kindly. Not even the coaches and players from deeply religious colleges or high schools. So, for me, the believability factor was a bit low.
Our Boys is a very nice story, told by a very good sports writer. It is a very fast read. It is well worth reading once. It would be easy to think that this book is a lot like the other football, or team sports books and movies. But that is not true; this book is unique and enjoyable.
 InterestingJan 11, 2010
I got this book as part of a first-reads giveaway. At first, I really didn't think that I'd enjoy it that much. I'm not a huge fan of non-fiction. Plus, although I enjoy watching a good football game, I don't know football inside and out like a lot of people do. I had never heard of the team before, and didn't think that I'd care about what really happened to them or to their football season.
I was wrong! Drape does an amazing job of making you care about this team, the players, and the town that nurtures them. This isn't a book that's just for football fans. It's a book for anyone that enjoys seeing true life challenges, struggles, and triumphs.
Although I did find myself getting a bit lost at times with some of the technical football jargon and descriptions of some of the plays. But despite that, this was an extremely enjoyable read. I saw that Drape has also written a book about The Race for the Triple Crown. That book sounds like it's a bit more up my alley of interest. Considering how much I enjoyed his writing on a topic I'm not all that interested about, I have every intention of checking out this other book
 Predictable and one-dimensionalJan 09, 2010
The author moved to the small town whose high school football team was undefeated for 4 seasons, in order to spend a year and write a book about the fifth season. The result (a fifth undefeated season, duh), is totally predictable. There's also a lot of obligatory prose about the great coach, building character, salty but inspiring old characters, support from the town, and the stories of a few individual players. But that's all.
To me, a great book has a plot (the story), a superplot (the bigger forces and issues), and a number of sub-plots (individual scenes). In this book, the plot is known in advance (inspired by a caring coach, team goes undefeated another year), and there is absolutely no superplot (nothing about the violence of football, nothing about the role of football or athletes in our society, nothing about football as metaphor for life, nothing about small-town values, nothing about issues boys face while growing up, nothing about what kids do after the glory of high-school football is over, nothing about the increasing violence and brain injuries endemic to football, just to pick a few obvious possibilities). We're left with just sub-plots--the book is a series of retellings of small individual stories (one player did this, one game went like this....), and the overall book achieves only smallness.
The story-line of small-town people achieving greatness (i.e., winning another 11 football games) by their simple dedication and talent is nice, but that's about all. The boys in question don't seem to be adolescents working out their coming of age; they are only about football. Rather than face their own growth into men, they decide not to date girls, for instance. They also don't seem to take any classes in high school or prepare themselves for anything else in life other than possibly playing more football, at least any such development is of no interest to the author. A small number of the team members went on to a local college; the rest apparently entered the workforce directly, doing what we aren't ever told. The author doesn't take much interest in anything after football--267 pages retell individual games or people's football stories, then 2 pages tell us devoted to what happened next to a handful of players. He gives the same treatment to former football heroes of the town--they were football and nothing else.
I was left with a very very repetitious overly-detailed telling of a large number of football games whose result was predictable before I even opened the cover, and I'm sorry I spent the time reading it.
Actually, I didn't intend to read the book. I got it for my 9-year old son who's very much into sports. He couldn't get interested, so he gave it back to me, and I obviously didn't like it much more. So who could read this book? All I can think of is boys entering high school who care only about football, maybe, or their fathers who want to achieve their dreams via their sons. They might find it inspiring, but that possibility just raises more questions in my mind.
 The antidote to "Friday Night Lights"Jan 09, 2010
First let me say that I enjoyed reading "Friday Night Lights" years ago. It was a well-written book. But it left a bad taste in my mouth, because in the final analysis, it became more of an expose on the supposed endemic racism in west Texas than a book about a high school football dynasty. (Is there racism in Odessa? Certainly. Is it the defining attribute of the people there? Don't think so. Could Bissinger have written a book exposing anti-white bigotry in the community surrounding Dallas Carter High School? Yes, except it wouldn't have been published).
In this excellent book, author Joe Drape chooses to focus on the good things in the small community of Smith Center, Kansas. Things like family cohesiveness, community spirit, traditional values. Could Drape have found some dirt if he'd dug deep enough? Sure -- there is dirt in every community in every state. But in this prototypical Midwestern small town, he focused on the big picture. And told a good, old-fashioned, American success story. And told it very entertainingly. This book proved to be the perfect mouthwash with which I was finally able to rinse out that bad taste that "Friday Night Lights" had left in my mouth.
Character Builds SuccessDec 30, 2009
The genesis of this tale can find its origin in a typical football season with an atypical football game. It was then the Smith Center Redmen scored 72 points in the first quarter of a game. This was a feat never before accomplished, and it grabbed national attention - including the attention of New York Times sportswriter Joe Drape, who traveled to the small Midwestern town for the story.
What he discovers is a story beyond that mere single quarter of football. Those seventy-two points was more than just a fluke that dropped onto a hapless Kansas team one football Friday night. There was a football program in place established on character-building as opposed to grossing a litany of wins.
And interestingly enough, while the community of Smith Center was building character within their boys, their boys were winning games - a lot of games. Every game played for the prior four seasons. Four consecutive state championships. Four consecutive perfect seasons. The longest winning streak in the nation. How? What was going on in Smith Center Kansas? Drape decided to move his family there for a season to find out. The result is this wonderful book.
From my own perspective as a true cynic towards the worlds of sports since the era of strikes and lockouts and free agency galore, I appreciated the integrity of the game being returned to its true roots. Drape's writing infuses substance into the game by telling the story of the people along with the town in which they reside. He even is able to develop a bit of suspense into the outcome of the games (though `perfect season' rests squarely on the book's cover) granting accessibility to even the most lethargic of football fans. This is a story for all who see value in the Midwestern way of life. Read it today, and then share it with your big-city friends.
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