An empty experience all around

By JOEY KNIGHT
Published April 11, 2007

All right, everyone, kindly get out your ballpoint and book of sports maxims. Time to update it.

Flip past the baseball part, where it talks about never walking the leadoff guy or talking to a pitcher who has a no-hitter going. Skip over the culinary chapter that warns about never buying food at a ballpark that must be eaten with a utensil.

That should take you to the football section. Found it? Great. Right beneath the paragraph that discourages doing the wave while your team is on offense, start a new one.

Your first sentence should read: Do not schedule high school football games in pro or major college stadiums.

To be honest, we should have written this one a long time ago.

Seems many folks out there, including some in our own community, have this thing about wanting their respective teenagers to experience the unique aura of competition in a setting rife with sleekness but bereft of atmosphere.

Fact is, the only thing truly unique about it is the number of empty seats - normally upward of 60,000 - in front of which these kids will play. When the quarterback audibles in one of these cavernous bowls, it echoes five city blocks.

Nonetheless, this misguided movement continues.

Only recently a push was made for a Friday night prep doubleheader to open the 2008 season at Raymond James Stadium. Three coaches reportedly were in favor of it. Armwood's Sean Callahan, whose team would have surrendered a home game against Plant to face the Panthers in the doubleheader's opening game at RayJay, dissented.

Callahan said his wariness stemmed not from losing the gate revenue of a true home game, but losing homefield advantage, period. The way he saw it, the Hawks would have been opening the season with a new quarterback against the defending Class 4A state champion in a setting that - regardless of attendance - can make a youngster "wide-eyed."

"I ran it by my coaches and my team and everybody seemed to be clearly on the side of playing it here," Callahan said. "I really don't want to give my advantage away."

Fortunately for the sake of what makes Friday nights truly special in these parts, he didn't. Now the Hawks-Panthers game will be played before roughly 8,000 in the snug confines of Lyle Flagg Stadium.

The electricity will be optimal, the elbow room minimal. Passers-by on Interstate 4 will honk. Late arrivals will line the fences, all the better to be right on top of the action. Sort of like last year's Hawks-Panthers playoff game at Dads Stadium.

"I thought that was a great homefield advantage for Plant," recalled Callahan, whose team lost that game. "It was electric. What I'm doing is trying to create that same thing."

Anyone who believes such an atmosphere can be replicated at Raymond James doesn't know an A-gap from an A-Train. Playing a high school game in a pro stadium would only be special if the stadium were filled. That will never happen.

Sure didn't last year, when Plant topped Ponte Vedra Beach Nease in the Class 4A title game under gray Saturday afternoon skies at Miami's Dolphin Stadium. The exhilaration of the game itself, in which Plant drove 78 yards in the last three minutes for a 25-21 triumph, was incomparable.

But as far as backdrops go, the Dolphins facility - barren of character and filled to less than 10 percent capacity - had nothing on the Panthers' four standing-room-only home playoff games that preceded it.

Now if we can all memorize this maxim and preach it to our proverbial congregations, this ill-conceived concept will go the way of wool jerseys.

Maybe the Florida High School Athletic Association will move its state title games to more prep-friendly venues. Expand the end-zone seating at a large high school stadium (such as Lakeland's Bryant Stadium), and you've got the perfect setting.

Sure beats the status quo, which is perfectly bland.

[Last modified April 10, 2007, 22:57:10]