Football slowly returns in Texas

Associated Press

HUMBLE, Texas

Blake Herrera fidgeted with the crisp, white jersey borrowed from another school before wiping an arm soaked in sweat on football pants that didn’t belong to him.

The senior didn’t care that the No. 22 across his chest wasn’t his and everything he wore was a hodgepodge of items donated from schools wanting to help.

What was important to the bright-eyed 17-year-old was this: His Kingwood High team was back together after flooding from Hurricane Harvey all but destroyed his school and everything in it. And in about 24 hours, he and his teammates would be back under the Friday night lights for a scrimmage that will be among the first of its kind since the storm shut down prep football in the largest city in Texas — a welcome and comforting step forward after scores of games were canceled or postponed in the state that reveres the sport more than any other.

“There was a time when us and our coaching staff thought that we might not play football again,” Herrera said. “But then when we got the help from (other) schools ... it really meant a lot to us and really touched our hearts. Because ... it was our life basically and it was sad that it got taken away from us.”

While Herrera and the rest of the Kingwood football team returned to practice this week, things are far from normal in an area where thousands of homes were swamped, many beyond repair. The team is practicing nine miles away from the school and Kingwood students will attend classes at still another school beginning on Monday.

“I equated the inside of Kingwood High school to what you see on the Titanic,” said Troy Kite, the athletic director for the Humble school district. “You just can’t describe the ruins that were in there. It’s just impossible. It’s like a movie, and yet that movie is now us.”

Kingwood is one of the schools hardest hit, but thousands of young athletes are trying to figure out their next move — not just where they might play but whether they will play at all. The University Interscholastic League, which oversees public school athletics in Texas, created a “Hurricane Harvey waiver” to allow students displaced by the storm to transfer and immediately be eligible for sports.

“This is really the largest disaster we’ve had to deal with in the state at the UIL level,” deputy director Jamey Harrison said. “We have dealt with other storms from Katrina where as a storm we were taking on a number of people that were displaced from Louisiana and other states and then Hurricanes Rita and Ike that impacted less schools and impacted them in a very different way than this one did.”

State officials recommended that the more than 2,700 students at Kingwood High simply transfer elsewhere while the school is repaired, Kite said. That would have not only have broken up an entire school, it would have meant none of its teams could play this season.

It was a plan district administrators quickly rejected.

Instead, they came up with an unusual plan that has Kingwood’s students attending classes at Summer Creek High. The Summer Creek students will go to school from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. each day and the Kingwood students will go from about 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. It also means that football is back, too, and just in time for teens eager for its familiar routines among the chaos.