Documenting football in small-town Kansas

August 30, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

“Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains With the Smith Center Redmen” by Joe Drape (Times Books, 269 pages, $25)

An East Coast sportswriter takes leave from his big-city newspaper job, moves to America’s heartland and endeavors to document a legendary high school football program.

He sits in on practices and meetings, roams the sidelines on Friday nights and lives among the coaches, players and parents in a remote and rural part of Kansas. The result is a book that ought to give us a well-rounded sense of a small town.

If all that sounds familiar, it’s what Buzz Bissinger did in the late 1980s when he embedded himself in Odessa, Texas.

Much like the television show that recently followed, “Friday Night Lights” used high school football as an entry point into a community, and Bissinger delved deep into racial issues, the region’s up-and-down oil economy and the state’s struggles to raise education standards, even as powerful football boosters resisted.

But in “Our Boys,” author Joe Drape finds that Smith Center, Kan., has its priorities straight — a more innocent place “where doors were usually unlocked and keys left in the ignition.” Coaches see themselves as educators first, and parents happily look on as their sons participate in a program that begins the 2009 season on top of a 67-game win streak.

Much of the pride, though, comes not only from seeing kids move on to big-time college football, but also from watching them evolve into good fathers and solid citizens, some of them businessmen and lawyers in big cities such as Kansas City and Denver.

“What we do around here real well is raise kids,” says Roger Barta, the Redmen’s revered coach — described by Drape as “plainspoken with a touch of Yoda-like wisdom.”

Football needs more adults with that kind of perspective, and Barta’s and Smith Center’s years of success are certainly worth celebrating.

So is the Redmen’s 2008 season, in which an inexperienced unit gradually gains confidence, grows together as a team and rolls over most opponents in the same dominating manner as their former classmates. “Our Boys” is a good read for anyone who loves the game, but the project feels like a missed opportunity.

Drape only briefly mentions the area’s methamphetamine problem, its aging population and its thin economy, and he spends too much of the book illustrating too many of the team’s players and family members.