On October 17, 1973, John McClamrock was paralyzed playing high school football. Doctors doubted he would make it through the night. But he and his mother refused to give up—for more than three decades.

Antonio Carrion was headed for the NFL when the voices started and he drifted away. Then his estranged mother finished her time for robbery and saved him from a system that’s unkind to the mentally ill.

Gun violence, high school football and what coaches are doing to keep their players safe

On the start of the high school football season in Odessa, Texas. An adaptation published alongside the release of Bissinger’s 1990 book of the same name, which led to the movie and the show.

“We need your help,” she said.

Religion, high school football, and racial problems in small town America.

The death of a high school football player and the life that has followed for the kid who made the hit.

The story of a small town just outside Pittsburgh that has suffered through a half-century of economic decline, racial tension, and endless crime. Despite that trajectory, or perhaps because of it, Aliquippa has also produced an astounding number of NFL players.

The author examines his terrible football career.

A former student and high school coach travel to California to kidnap the coach's daughter, an adult film actress.

"I would watch her green eyes, the smile that always closed them. I remember her face lit by a Bunsen burner's quivering flame, laughter bursting from her like confetti. Once, I saw her slap Junior Wendell's hand away from her skirt, and I felt the confinement of a teenage girl. The way her mind was full of longings—a knot of emotions constantly rising to the surface, washing over her, carrying her through a harrowed suburban field, past the shopping mall and long acres of bluestem grass, into the back seats of cars, truckbeds."

Tensions rise when a high school teacher fails a star student-athlete.

"Word spread: Jimmy Carter, the prize of the Permian Basin, the boy who could flat-out fly, the jovial kid who never turned in work but still somehow always got Cs, was in danger of getting yanked off the team, all because some Yankee teacher had to show his moral fiber. How convenient that his son just happened to be the backup."

A rape case in which most of the evidence lies in the archives of Twitter and Instagram divides a football-crazed town of 18,400.

Lance Butterfield was the captain of the football team, had a 4.0 GPA and a girl he loved. It wasn’t enough for his dad. And then his dad became too much for him.
Part of our guide to Skip Hollandsworth’s true crime writing at Slate.

A 15-year-old dies shortly after collapsing from heatstroke during a high school football practice. Was it has coach’s fault? The state thought so, and put him on trial.