To publish or not to publish?

Note: I'm not sure if I want to publish this as a column in the publication which shall not be named. So I'm posting it here and asking your opinion.

"Gentlemen, the hopes and dreams of an entire town are riding on your shoulders. You may never matter again in your life as much as you do right now." - Permian High School football coach Gary Gaines to his team (From the book "Friday Night Lights").

In his book "Friday Night Lights," Buzz Bissinger focuses on the high school football team the small, economically depressed town of Odessa in west Texas where they derive their entire identity from its football team.

When the team loses a game, the coach returns home to find a "For Sale" sign in his yard. And that's one of the more tame incidents in the book that chronicles the 1988 Permian Panthers from summer workouts to their heartbreaking loss in the semifinals.

The pressure on these kids (and coaches) is enormous for an extra-curricular activity.

While the book (published in 1990) is superficially about high school football, the true emphasis of the book is the pressure put on the students and the apparent lack of big-picture thinking in the town.

Bissinger, himself, described the book as being about "the power of hope, the spellbinding brilliance of it as well as the danger of it."

He was also struck at the very nature of the beast that is high school sports.

"I saw the way in which they were discarded once their athletic powers dried up . . . I saw the way in which educating these boys, because they were still boys, of preparing them for life after football, was considered as little more than an afterthought."

How could it happen that a town would allow the school board to spend more on athletic tape than on English books? Why would a town stand for a coach that discouraged his players from taking the SAT because it would interfere with the game film study on Saturday mornings?

And while the book was about a Texas town, it could just as well have been written about any town where football is king and everything else is inconsequential.

"Ten years later I am more convinced that what happened in Odessa was by no means unexceptional," Bissinger said in a speech in 2001.

It could be about a place where thousands of fans, parents and friends attend games each week, but never ask how history class is going. It could be about a town where thousands of dollars and countless hours are donated to athletics, but academic teams struggle for any attention despite the fact their teams put in just as much effort to their competition.

More than anything, the book is about priorities and what a community places the most importance on.

So why bring this book up? Well, with the start of high school football season around the state, I figured it was a good time to have a priority check.

After all, thousands of people will go to a high school football game each Friday night, but how many of those people (myself included) bother to show up to a school board meeting unless something crucial like the colors of the school's mascot are being discussed?

And we here at (The publication which shall not be named) aren't immune from this either. We've got three reporters dedicated to covering sports (two who are mainly focused on high school athletics), but no one who covers the education beat.

Is this a good thing? Well, it sells papers, which is the ultimate goal of the business. (In theory we're here to be the watchdog for the community, but only if that watchdog status will pad the bottom line.)

This is far from an indictment on high school athletics. I played soccer in high school and the games and teamwork can teach valuable life lessons. But the key there is "life lessons." If what is learned is only applied between the lines on the field, the character-building element of high school sports is nonexistent.

So go, enjoy the games on Friday nights (as well as the games of the not-so-high profile sports.) Just remember, they're called student-athletes for a reason.