Second in a series

Small white signs off of U.S. Highway 43 in Franklin County guide a stream of cars to Russellville High School on a fall Friday evening.

Simply emblazoned with the phrase "To Stadium" and a directional arrow, the markers say nothing about an academic institution.

It's OK, though, the cavalcade of fans knows where it's going. This is football country, where the game is synonymous with high schools large and small all over northwest Alabama, and the signage is in its citizens' language.

The scene is the same every Friday, and occasionally Thursdays, this time of year everywhere in this corner of the state and elsewhere throughout the South. Students, alumni, parents and some fans with proximity as their only affiliation flock to these local shrines, rain or shine.

To ask why is like questioning people why they breathe, and it often draws a curious look. It's just always been this way, at least as long as some of the oldest old-timers can remember.

"I guess I ought to know," quipped longtime Russellville fan Homer Grissom. "Some people might tell you stories about me, but I guess, as the old saying goes, I'm just a has been."

Like a poker player, Grissom downplays his expertise. But get him talking, and the 84-year-old will recite, in detail, story after story accumulated while following football for generations.

He graduated from Russellville in 1943 but never played football. A University of Alabama fan since the 1930s, he latched on to the high school game after witnessing his first contest in 1940.

Now, he's a season ticket holder and has attended just about every home game except during the time he spent in the military during World War II.

"And as long as the Lord tells me I can go, I will," he said.

For years, Grissom fed Russellville football players while running the Frosty Inn drive-in. Today, he rarely misses a Touchdown Club meeting, where he and other super fans help break down game film with coaches.

Spending most of his life around high school football, Grissom never really questioned it.

"I love the game and watching these young men develop," he said. "High school football is something good for young men to do - competing, learning how to get along with your common man. Some qualify to go on to a greater level. Even if they don't, it is still such a great opportunity."

Grissom believed that so much he helped form the program's booster club in 1951 and was instrumental in helping first build what has become a sparkling college-like stadium that can seat tens of thousands.

Few other area schools' might be able to match Tiger Stadium in grandeur. Florence's Braly Stadium, with a capacity of 13,000, certainly commands respect.

But from Lexington to Red Bay, Collinwood to Courtland, facilities large and small stand out as centerpieces of civic pride.

"Usually the high school is the center of the community in these towns, and the football stadium is the perfect symbol for that," Brooks coach Jerry Hill said. "I think it's just a sense of your community. In high school, most people grow up there and most of their parents went to the same school and sometimes even their grandparents."

Hill knows that legacies fuel the hunger for football. His father, Harlon Hill, excelled at Lauderdale County High and Florence State Teachers College before going on to an NFL career that helped make him the namesake for NCAA Division II football's most outstanding player award.

Following in his father's footsteps, Jerry Hill played for his dad at Brooks before going on to the University of North Alabama and eventually getting drafted by the NFL's Washington Redskins.

Still, throughout his journey, there was something wholesome about high school football that made the game at that level endearing.

"There's more of a family atmosphere," said Hill, who today coaches his son and nephew. "So many outsiders come in to make a team in college and the NFL. In high school, you see the same people every day at the store and at church that you see at the game Friday night. There's also the fact that most high school players don't even play in college, and few of them will play in the NFL. In high school football, you got your average kid who can be on the team and participate.

"That makes the game really special. I loved it, I saw how much my dad loved it and that impacted me. By watching him I knew I wanted to coach at the high school level, and I enjoy it as much now as I did when I played."

That's not to say small town football is small-time, though. Fans prove otherwise weekly with tailgate parties and pregame rituals, from chicken and ribs before Deshler's annual rivalry game against Brooks to a homecoming shrimp boil with Muscle Shoals' Gridiron Gals outside J.F. Moore Stadium.

"The excitement, the support from the community, it's like a college environment," said Joel Logan, a former kicker at Mississippi State whose son plays for the Trojans. "The atmosphere here for football games is as good as I've ever been around, the best I've seen in a long time."

Some say there are deeply rooted reasons for such pomp over a game played by teenagers. It provides a release and a rallying point, they say, in communities in a part of the country where poverty and negative perception due to past problems can wear on the human psyche.

"This area, sometimes there's not a lot that brings a lot of pride," Deshler coach John Mothershed said. "This is a way to bring community pride."

And the way this area, in particular, and its schools are arranged only helps intensify those feelings of pride when it comes to football, Mothershed said.

The two-county Shoals area alone, with a population of roughly 145,000, has 15 high schools that field football teams. Extend the sample area to include outlying communities and the number grows to 30 teams in an area of slightly more than 200,000 residents.

Not only does that allow more players to participate, but it also fuels competition, Mothershed said.

"Football provides an identity," he said. "We've already proven with Robert Trent Jones and the railcar plant that we can all come together as a community when it's time to. But yet each individual community can have so much pride in their own (football) program. It's kind of like a family rivalry. We can be a family and come together but still hang on to the past where everybody was a little more independent."

There's definitely something to be said for the spirit of camaraderie football evokes, said Lanny Norris, a Russellville booster and former letterman who played for Bear Bryant at Alabama. Especially in this part of the country, he said, there's nothing like it.

"In the South in particular, there's just a certain smell that goes with football - the smell of the cut grass in the fall, the small town stuff," he said. "It just pulls the community together no matter what's going on. Whether it's the economy, war or whatever may be taking place in the world, the one thing people can unite on is that high school football team.'

Bryan App can be reached at 740-5730 or bryan.app@TimesDaily.com.