The Top Out of View

American high school football is a showcase for players' skills, a Friday night diversion, an energizing community-unifying activity. But there's more to it than that.Through free verse poems, the author helps give readers a view of some of the inner dramas contained within a typical season.For more than forty years I've coached football to high school players. What draws me back is that every season offers unexpected moments of truth--framed by the primal intensity of physical competition--for players and coaches alike. Invariably they reveal insights into human courage and fear, humor and grief, doubt and affirmation, that go far past practice and games. Those experiences are fleeting, hard to capture with words. I find that even stringing sentences together easily becomes too wordy and off the mark. So in this collection I've used short-line free verse poems to offer readers glimpses of what, in football, most often remains just out of view. Free verse poetry may or may not be a natural genre for writing about football; I do appreciate you wanting to give it a look.