The Best American Sports Writing 2014(9)

First he explained his decision to Enrique Ruiz Jr., the principal of Premont’s only high school: eliminating sports would save money and refocus everyone’s attention on academics. Ruiz agreed. The school was making other changes too, such as giving teachers more time for training and planning, making students wear uniforms, and aligning the curriculum with more rigorous state standards. Suspending sports might get the attention of anyone not taking those changes seriously.

Then Singleton told the school’s football coach, a history teacher named Richard Russell, who’d been coaching for two decades. Russell had played basketball and football in high school, and he loved sports. But he preferred giving up the team to shutting down the whole district. He told Singleton to do whatever he needed to do, then walked over to the gym and told the basketball players, who were waiting for practice to begin. At first, the students didn’t seem to understand. “What? Why?” asked Nathan, then a junior and a quarterback on the football team. “Would you rather have sports or school?” Russell replied.

Out by the tennis courts, Daniel, a junior who was in line to become a captain of the football team, was waiting for tennis practice to start when a teacher came out and delivered the news. Daniel went home and texted his friends in disbelief, hoping there had been some kind of mistake.

“We were freaking out,” says Mariela, a former cheerleader and tennis and volleyball player. American kids expect to participate in school sports as a kind of rite of passage. “We don’t get these years back,” she told me. “I’m never going to get the experience of cheering as captain under the lights.”

As the news trickled out, reporters from all over America came to witness the unthinkable. A photographer followed Nathan around, taking pictures of him not playing football, which the Corpus Christi Caller-Times ran in a photo essay titled “Friday Without Football in Premont.”

Many observers predicted that Singleton’s experiment would end in disaster. Premont was a speck on the map, an hour and a half southwest of Corpus Christi. The town’s population had dwindled since the oil fields had dried up, and a majority of the 282 high school students who remained were from low-income Hispanic families. How many football players would drop out? How many cheerleaders would transfer to the next town’s school? How would kids learn about grit, teamwork, and fair play?





Last fall at Premont, the first without football, was quiet—eerily so. There were no Friday night games to look forward to, no players and their parents cheered onto the field on opening night, no cheerleaders making signs in the hallway, no football practice 10 or more hours a week. Only the basketball team was allowed to play, though its tournament schedule was diminished.

More than a dozen students transferred, including four volleyball players and a football player. Most went to a school 10 miles away, where they could play sports. Two teachers who had been coaches left as well. To boost morale, Principal Ruiz started holding sports-free pep rallies every Friday. Classes competed against each other in drum-offs and team-building exercises in the school gym.

But there was an upside to the quiet. “The first 12 weeks of school were the most peaceful beginning weeks I’ve ever witnessed at a high school,” Singleton says. “It was calm. There was a level of energy devoted to planning and lessons, to after-school tutoring. I saw such a difference.”

Nathan missed the adrenaline rush of running out onto the field and the sense of purpose he got from the sport. But he began playing flag football for a club team on the weekends, and he admitted to one advantage during the week: “It did make you focus. There was just all this extra time. You never got behind on your work.”

That first semester, 80 percent of the students passed their classes, compared with 50 percent the previous fall. About 160 people attended parent-teacher night, compared with six the year before. Principal Ruiz was so excited that he went out and took pictures of the parking lot, jammed with cars. Through some combination of new leadership, the threat of closure, and a renewed emphasis on academics, Premont’s culture changed. “There’s been a definite decline in misbehavior,” says Desiree Valdez, who teaches speech, theater, and creative writing at Premont. “I’m struggling to recall a fight. Before, it was one every couple of weeks.”

Suspending sports was only part of the equation, but Singleton believes it was crucial. He used the savings to give teachers raises. Meanwhile, communities throughout Texas, alarmed by the cancellation of football, raised $400,000 for Premont via fund-raisers and donations—money that Singleton put toward renovating the science labs.