For a similar experience for bbq, highly recommend South Moon BBQ on 30 in downtown Hinkley, who has the rest of the kitsch memorabilia in the area. The food is pretty tasty and their arcade has a good variety!
It'd be surreal to go back to that high school and eat pizza, I guess I know what I'm doing at some point!
Eating pizza in the glow of cyan lights. One of the coolest thing about cyan lights is magenta shadows.
I love the notion of a school's best players being on the soccer team. A few reasons why:
* I've never been a huge fan of football, not to disrespect the sport, but mainly because it intrudes on the baseball season, which I'm more passionate about.
* The issue of violence and head injuries in football raises concerns.
* Why does football get the focus of the school's attention? Giving other fall sports attention is great! Maybe girls tennis. Or cross country, golf (scratch that), girls swimming, or girls volleyball.
* With soccer being the international sport, it makes perfect sense to feature it as the homecoming game. I wonder if other countries have similar homecoming traditions and if they celebrate soccer in the same way we do.
* There's a certain honesty in admitting that the school isn't proficient in football. Embracing the sport where the school truly excels, such as soccer, not only showcases the talent of the students but also fosters a sense of pride in their achievements.
In 1993 though the idea of soccer as the main sport would absolutely have been a frank calculation of the situation at hand, not something thinking about all of those other good ideas!
I think the U.S. is slowly coming around to the idea that soccer has a different kind of pageantry associated with it. Think of it like this: Why is Homecoming about a parade and floats? What else could it be about?
We didn't have parades or floats, and we had homecoming before we even had a fall sport! We got soccer in 1992ish but before that it was just the Fall Dance after the girls' volleyball game of the week.
The neighboring town had football so I think our schedule was influenced by them.
(We were, and still are, A Basketball Town. Whole town came to basketball games on Friday night, and I'm sure plenty of parents hauled themselves up to Malta when the time came.)
I'm always fascinated by the hold that football has on so much of America, and it always tickled me that we had no interest in football, perhaps because 1: harvest season, 2: not enough players, 3: nobody cared.
I suspect there are a lot of towns the size of Malta or Hinckley or Shabbona where there was / is no football and where Basketball Is Uncontested King. The Illinois equivalents of the school from the movie Hoosiers.
I think most of the schools in our area, although they all had football, basketball "mattered" more to the town. But the football team literally had 4x as many dudes on it, so to the student body, that can easily tilt the scales.
Counterpoint: there are a lot more football divisions within IHSA; when I was in high school, there were only two basketball divisions (A and AA), but there were six football divisions come playoff time, so there were literally 3x as many schools which won state championships every year. I think this alone had the effect of supercharging football.
This was an awesome piece. And I think our next in person meeting needs to be Malta adjacent
For a similar experience for bbq, highly recommend South Moon BBQ on 30 in downtown Hinkley, who has the rest of the kitsch memorabilia in the area. The food is pretty tasty and their arcade has a good variety!
It'd be surreal to go back to that high school and eat pizza, I guess I know what I'm doing at some point!
Eating pizza in the glow of cyan lights. One of the coolest thing about cyan lights is magenta shadows.
I love the notion of a school's best players being on the soccer team. A few reasons why:
* I've never been a huge fan of football, not to disrespect the sport, but mainly because it intrudes on the baseball season, which I'm more passionate about.
* The issue of violence and head injuries in football raises concerns.
* Why does football get the focus of the school's attention? Giving other fall sports attention is great! Maybe girls tennis. Or cross country, golf (scratch that), girls swimming, or girls volleyball.
* With soccer being the international sport, it makes perfect sense to feature it as the homecoming game. I wonder if other countries have similar homecoming traditions and if they celebrate soccer in the same way we do.
* There's a certain honesty in admitting that the school isn't proficient in football. Embracing the sport where the school truly excels, such as soccer, not only showcases the talent of the students but also fosters a sense of pride in their achievements.
In 1993 though the idea of soccer as the main sport would absolutely have been a frank calculation of the situation at hand, not something thinking about all of those other good ideas!
I think the U.S. is slowly coming around to the idea that soccer has a different kind of pageantry associated with it. Think of it like this: Why is Homecoming about a parade and floats? What else could it be about?
We didn't have parades or floats, and we had homecoming before we even had a fall sport! We got soccer in 1992ish but before that it was just the Fall Dance after the girls' volleyball game of the week.
The neighboring town had football so I think our schedule was influenced by them.
(We were, and still are, A Basketball Town. Whole town came to basketball games on Friday night, and I'm sure plenty of parents hauled themselves up to Malta when the time came.)
I'm always fascinated by the hold that football has on so much of America, and it always tickled me that we had no interest in football, perhaps because 1: harvest season, 2: not enough players, 3: nobody cared.
This is Hinckley - Big Rock we're talking?
I suspect there are a lot of towns the size of Malta or Hinckley or Shabbona where there was / is no football and where Basketball Is Uncontested King. The Illinois equivalents of the school from the movie Hoosiers.
I think most of the schools in our area, although they all had football, basketball "mattered" more to the town. But the football team literally had 4x as many dudes on it, so to the student body, that can easily tilt the scales.
Counterpoint: there are a lot more football divisions within IHSA; when I was in high school, there were only two basketball divisions (A and AA), but there were six football divisions come playoff time, so there were literally 3x as many schools which won state championships every year. I think this alone had the effect of supercharging football.
That place looks so cool! I am surprised to see the pizza cut into triangles, though.
Love it. Love when you write this stuff.