In every corner of the Lone Star State, high school football legends are told from generation to generation, sometimes these stories are only memorialized in an oral tradition. Fortunately, a new book by sports journalist Chad S. Conine has now recorded for history some of the biggest Texas high school football games and the role their coaches and players had in them. Chad spoke with us this week about the art of sportswriting and his The Republic of Football: Legends of the Texas High School Game (University of Texas Press, 2016).

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Chad, where did you grow up and how did that inform your writing later in life?

CHAD S. CONINE: I grew up in Waco. My family moved to Waco from Lubbock when I was three years old. All of my grandparents and a lot of my extended family still lived in Lubbock, so we made the six-hour drive a lot (the speed limit was only fifty-five then). I was always really close with my grandparents, so being on the road to see them was exciting for me. Maybe that’s why I spend so much time driving now. It always seems like it’s going to be worth it. Driving to towns all over Texas has become a big part of my career as a sportswriter and it was a huge part of The Republic of Football.

When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

Probably by middle school. I think I read Friday Night Lights in the eighth grade and I wanted to write a book like that. I already wanted to be a sportswriter by then, but that book inspired me. Now, twenty-five years later, I guess I finally did that. I don’t want to compare The Republic of Football to Friday Night Lights too much because they’re different in concept. And I definitely didn’t set out saying “time to write my Friday Night Lights.” But it was a big deal to me (and a big part of the reason why I didn’t love the movie and can’t watch the TV show).

What’s the first professional break you ever received?

I’m thankful that I have a lot to pick from here. I’m going to go all the way back to freshman year of high school when my journalism teacher, Kathi Couch, asked me to write a story on the high school’s new boys’ basketball coach. That was the first thing I ever wrote as a journalist. Mrs. Couch knew I wanted to be a sportswriter and gave me that opportunity. The next year, I was the sports editor for the school paper and I’ve been doing it ever since. Kathi Couch died last fall, but I’m friends with her daughter and she gave me a heads up that her mom’s health wasn’t good. I had the chance to go see her during the summer and tell her about my project and how much of an impact she had on me as a journalist.

What made you decide to capture the legends of Texas High School Football with The Republic of Football?

That’s something that really built on itself. After I interviewed Art Briles at Baylor for the first chapter that I wrote, I went to Kliff Kingsbury at Texas Tech and then Dat Nguyen and LaDainian Tomlinson. I set out to tell fifty high school football stories from fifty Texas towns (I only got to forty-one, for now). So the idea of legends wasn’t necessarily the goal. But having started with prominent figures, that opened the door to continue speaking with people who had achieved big-time fame in football. The thing is, and I think I was lucky here, all of the football stars I spoke with had great, impactful stories to tell about their high school days. That’s not a mutually inclusive deal. I think some of the guys that ended up turning me down did so because they didn’t have as compelling of high school stories to tell.

For our readers who haven’t read The Republic of Football, will you describe the book for them?

It’s forty-one chapters, each chapter on a different town in Texas. So it’s an anthology. It’s in chronological order, with a couple of tweaks in order to book-end the book the way I thought worked best. So the second chapter is about Hayden Fry’s 1946 Odessa Bronchos team and the 39th chapter is about the great Aledo teams that featured Johnathan Gray from 2008 to 2011. Geographically, the book goes from White Deer in the Panhandle to Corpus Christi, and from Odessa out west to West Orange–Stark near the Louisiana border.

What’s the most memorable high school football game you ever attended?

That’s a loaded question. A couple of the most memorable games I’ve covered as a sportswriter also include the memory of being screamed at by a coach after the game. So it’s kind of difficult for me to succinctly describe those games. But that illustrates the passion involved. There’s one game in the book, and only one, where I actually covered it for the newspaper and then later wrote about it for The Republic of Football. It was pretty awesome, but I’ll leave it for interested readers to get to that one themselves. I know that’s kind of a non-answer. How about this: Waco Midway versus Highland Park in Corsicana, Thanksgiving weekend, 2008. Midway won, 41-36.

How has sportswriting changed since you started in the business (even though you are only in your thirties, it’s been a dynamic couple of decades)?

Well, I could write 5,000 words on this topic without breaking a sweat. I’ll try to keep it simple. The media companies that own newspapers by the dozens have made it very difficult to be a sportswriter (and newspaper journalist in general). So most of my friends that I worked with at newspapers in the late ’90s and early 2000s do something related, but no longer work for newspapers. My friends who still do it (and even the ones who have gone to work for other non-newspaper entities) do it (or did it) because they’re passionate about the work. That’s the only reason.

And now that I’ve written that, I realize it doesn’t quite answer the question (but I can’t bring myself to delete it and start over). So I’ll add that blogs and social media have made it so sportswriters have to be more versatile and web-savvy. But they’ve done that. I have a friend who used to type URLs into a Yahoo search window because that’s how he knew how to use the Internet. And now he’s an expert tweeter. So sportswriters have kept pace with new media, but that sports staffs at newspaper are still much smaller than they were when I started. [sic]

You call Waco home. What made you choose Waco as a home base?

There are some good logistical reasons. As a freelancer, it’s good to be able to get to Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, Bryan–College Station, etc., pretty easily. I bought a house here in 2008 when I still worked for the Waco Tribune-Herald and thanks to Fixer-Upper that seems like a dang good investment. But mostly I just like it here. I’ve long since learned how to be a Red Raider living amongst the dancing Bears.

What advice do you have for aspiring sportswriters?

Start by covering high school sports. In Texas, that’s easy because people care so much about not only football, but basketball, soccer, baseball, softball, you name it. The coaches are used to having reporters talk to them, so they’re understanding. But the other side of it is that at high school games, you have to keep your own stats and fend for yourself in a lot of different ways. So when you go from that to college and pro games when they provide stats and hold postgame press conferences, it’s so much easier. It’s the opposite of riding a bike. It’s as if you learned how to ride a bike and then put on the training wheels.

In closing — my most important question for you! What’s the best high school football stadium food in Texas?

Oh, man, the most important question and I’m going to fail at it. You see, most of the time when I go to cover a game, they have food in the press box. So I can tell you that Gatesville wins the prize for best press box food on the planet. All I can offer for fans, and this is kind of obvious, is this: don’t get a burger unless you can see the person grilling them. A sausage wrap is always your best bet.

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