Another Round at the Say When: Dreaming of Those Friday Night Lights
A journalist moves to the small town of McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada line, to learn about why the high school football team never wins, and about the townsfolk who cheer them on, no matter what.
One in a series.
I came to this small western town, to spend a season with its young high school football players and the residents who support them, to try to capture life in a place that in recent decades has witnessed a massive social upheaval.
Across the U.S., until COVID began a brief reversal of the trend, long-time residents of towns like this one have been packing up their children and their entrepreneurial spirit and leaving rural America for better opportunities elsewhere.
In McDermitt, the mine that was a stable employer and community leader for decades closed down in 1992. Thirty years later, that economic footprint is just a memory.
But life goes on here. People work their farms and ranches, swing by the post office to pick up their mail, maybe stop for a drink at the Say When casino.
And come fall, the McDermitt Bulldogs play eight-man football.
At a high school with 28 students and, this year, five seniors, both boys and girls are encouraged to play sports year-round and have come to set their internal clocks by the passing of the seasons — August means football, November means basketball and March signals the start of track and field.
The pressure to play comes not just from coaches, but from fellow students. Without enough players to populate a team, the season is over before it starts.
In football, they don't always make it. There just aren't enough bodies -- willing or able.
For nearly a decade now, the Bulldogs have been coached by Richard Egan, a Paiute Shoshone who sports the big-man athletic build of a one-time ranch cowboy. Richard moved here at age 16 and played on the town's undefeated 1982 team that won the state championship.
After that, he never left. McDermitt is home.
He’s quiet-spoken, unvarnished, the father of two grown boys and a daughter, who has developed a deeply-rooted spirit of mentoring.
In addition to his job as the school’s groundskeeper, he coaches a team that competes in Division 1A, the state’s smallest league, where a handful of rural schools field only eight players a game rather than the traditional 11.
Many years, the Bulldogs fail to win a single game.
Still, as football coach, Richard wants the best for his boys, win or lose. He wants them to enjoy the same perks as all those more-privileged teams backed by mining money, with the best equipment, facilities, and boosters who won’t settle for anything but the best.
In the past, when times were better, McDermitt was one of those teams whose high school hallway display cases were brimming with current trophies.
Even after the money left, McDermitt fielded winning teams. In recent years, the school has competed with the best of Nevada’s top-flight programs, with both their boys and girls enjoying winning seasons, and a post-season life, in basketball, volleyball and track and field.
But unlike those other schools, money remains an issue here.
Consider these numbers from just a few years back: McDermitt’s $60,000 annual sports budget was nearly consumed by $38,000 in fees to bus players from all sports to distant away games, not to mention $12,000 for referees, leaving only $10,000 for everything else.
In football, you need practice equipment to simulate games. So the players make do with mostly hand-me-down equipment, with shoulder pads and a blocking sled donated by other schools.
They only got new game uniforms a few years back because of an unexpected donation by a foundation run by the NFL’s Washington football team.
The school’s playing field features a single set of small bleachers. For years, there was little money to provide on-field services until the shop class built a humble restroom.
But Richard doesn’t let his teams dwell on what they lack. He focuses on what they do have — a youthful vigor to go out and compete, to play their best, win or lose.
At one away-game a few seasons ago, the Bulldogs traveled to the town of Eureka, a community flush with sports money. They walked onto a field that rivaled that of a respectable college team, a gleaming sports temple complete with a state-of-the-art weight room, field lighting and synthetic playing surface — much of it built by local mining money.
Not only that, but the hometown Vandals are whisked to away games in the comfort of a sophisticated tour bus with their team insignia emblazoned on the side.
Like pro athletes, or rock stars.
That day, the McDermitt boys marveled at a far more privileged world than the one they knew back home. At home, the state line runs through the school grounds, and its football field technically lies in Oregon, amid an isolated spread of dirt and sagebrush.
That day, Richard saw a teaching moment in his grasp.
Long after his playing days, the grandfather of four remains a proud Bulldog. That day in Eureka, he would not stand to see his team’s heart broken by another kid’s birthright. Under his watch, there would be no more damage to these teenagers’ fragile egos. And so he rallied them together, like a coach and like a father.
Nothing rah-rah, just humble encouragement.
“Sure, these kids are lucky to have everything they have,” he said. “But they can only put eight players on that field, just like us. So once we step off that bus, we represent our community, our school and our families. But mostly, we represent ourselves.”
The Bulldogs lost that day 64-12. In Richard’s eyes, his boys — from ranches and farms and the nearby Native American reservation — still came out winners.
Still, for the coaches, each football season presents a new struggle to rally enough players to take the field. The Bulldogs were forced to forfeit their entire season in 2013 and in 2019 because they could not round up enough players.
This season is no different.
Two weeks before the season opener, Richard is in jeopardy of losing another chance to teach these local boys not only how to compete on the football field, but to make their mark as young men.
He uses that time on the playing field to encourage them to be who they are, young and proud, even when they are out-manned and out-moneyed, to get up after taking the big hit, to hold their heads up, even when it’s the other team that’s celebrating.
Years down the road, his players won’t recall the final scores, but what they will remember is that youthful thrill of competition.
The hits. The sweaty locker rooms. The boyish banter.
Richard wants his team to win, not just this one but the crop of new young player who will show up next season, and the year after that.
But he also wants something else, a thing just as enduring.
He wants to stand on the sidelines of his humble home field, look up, and see lights.
Friday night lights, the pole-top beacons that will allow his teams to compete after the sun goes down, to feel the cool autumn nighttime air on their faces.
To feel like any other kid, on any other team, in any other American small town.
That’s his dream.
Playing at home on a frenetic Friday night.
Under the lights.
“Just to see the looks on their faces,” he says. “Imagine that.”