THE BANDANA EXPRESS

Haymore offers a detailed history of the year the Giles High School football team won the Virginia state championship.

When Steve Ragsdale became the head coach of the football team at Giles High School in Pearisburg, Virginia, everyone already knew his name; his father, Harry, had held the same position for more than 30 years. Steve inherited less-than-bright prospects—the school community was “deeply fractured,” and many adopted a “defeatist attitude” about the team’s hopes of success. Steve knew he had to do more than just coach…he had to establish a “winning tradition.” Just two years later, in 1980, his Spartans won the state championship, a remarkable milestone—over the course of 30 years Steve would win 255 games, an astonishingly impressive number. Haymore provides a relentlessly thorough account of the Spartans’ history, focusing on the early years under Steve’s tenure, one dominated by his “aggressive mentality” in his role as an “intimidating disciplinarian” and a “larger-than-life presence.” The author obviously knows the sport well and furnishes a captivating account of the team’s signature strategy: the unbalanced single-wing offense, established by Steve’s father. (“A masterpiece of old-fashioned power and timely deception, Harry’s refined strategy combined the fierceness of the lion with the cunning of the fox. It was the perfect synergy: the strength of brute-force line bucks and off-tackle smashes mixed with the trickery of reverses, spins, and laterals.”) The depth and rigor of Haymore’s research is laudable, and his enthusiasm for the subject is unabashed and infectious. However, it is very unlikely that a reader unfamiliar with the Spartans football team will be interested in a such a granular history of the program, complete with play-by-play accounts of significant games. This is a well-executed work, but one that only promises to appeal to an exceedingly limited audience.

An intelligently rendered history unlikely to grip a broad readership.