MIKE BURKE

Allegany Communications Sports

Yes, fall sports practice in the state of Maryland began yesterday, August 14th, while West Virginia high schools have been hard at work for over a week.

For those of us who grew up during the Dark Ages, though, today is the day that remains the red-letter day, because, regardless of the circumstances of the calendar, August 15th, come hell or high water, was the earliest summer football practice could begin in Maryland. And while there’s no need to speculate how long ago those dark ages took place, all you need to know is the Cumberland schools did not have soccer then.

So for us, all of these years later, August 15th still gets our attention. To paraphrase the great George Carlin, the mere mention of the date will curve your spine, grow hair on your hands, and instinctively make you believe your summer is officially over.

It was all so different then, as today, with the year-round training activities that are now permitted, all of the sports have pretty much become year-round activities.

On August 14th of The Day, though, football players had but one choice, and that was to go to the neighborhood public swimming pool for the final summer fling. August 14th would be their summer swan song and they would play it to the hilt, rough-housing in the pool and, most importantly, checking out all the girls they were about to leave behind; for less than 24 hours away, hell awaited – three weeks of three-a-day practice, as in those days school did not start until the day after Labor Day.

How much did they practice during the summer back then? By the first day of school, over half of Fort Hill’s football practices for the entire season had been completed.

What a concept it was to have your entire summer off, as though we knew any better anyway, but when you were just one day away from saying goodbye to the final three weeks of your summer vacation, you were making quite a sacrifice, so that final day of summer was going to be a good one.

The pool at the Constitution Park seemed to be a smaller place on that day because high school athletes then, particularly the football players, always seemed to be physically larger than life to us when we were little kids. And even in the recesses of our memories, they still seem bigger than high school football players have been since, even though that has hardly been the case.

Actually, the guys we went to school with were every bit as large, if not larger than their predecessors were, because in the 1970s, thanks to something called the Universal Gym, summer team weight training was just beginning to take hold. Heights on the rosters may have remained about the same, but weights began to creep upward.

Players no longer showed up on August 15th to get into shape for the season. If they weren’t in shape by August 15th, they wouldn’t be around for the season.

It’s even more extreme now deep into the free weights era, as a couple of years ago, while sharing Greenway Avenue Stadium with a number of high school football players, I couldn’t escape the notion that I had somehow taken a wrong turn and wound up at a teamsters meeting. Some of these kids were monsters, and by monsters I mean in their physical stature, which provides the visual proof in understanding how much of a year-round venture high school sports has become.

There were very few days this summer, including Sundays, that the field and the track at Greenway were not dotted with groups of kids working out, staying in shape, or just having some fun, whether they were playing football or soccer. And it’s been a gratifying thing to see.

With West Virginia schools already in their second week of practice and Maryland football practice resuming yesterday, we’ll begin to see more and more activity around the schools and the fields, and just as the swallows return to Capistrano, old and new generations of railbirds, fence-leaners and partisan observers will return as well, which I’ve never quite understood.

Football practice is probably the single most boring activity in the world to take part in, and even more boring to watch. But it’s high school football, and with the fall season approaching, regardless of how small we have become or how large we believe we are, it still has its grip on us, which is nice, and in many ways quite important.

Everything has changed.

Nothing has changed at all.

Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @MikeBurkeMDT