With 6 Boys and a Football, Tiny Texas Towns Stay Alive
This cotton-farming town on the Texas prairie has lost three of its four cafes, all three gas stations, both pharmacies, both barber shops, the three-story Coleman Hotel and its picture show. It has lost more than two-thirds of its peak population and about half its school football team.
But only half.
All of which goes to explain why nearly the entire town of 243 people turned out in a rattling West Texas wind on Friday night to watch the undefeated hometown Mustangs take on the undefeated Klondike Cougars for the Division 5-A championship of the state Six-Man Football League.Damn Yankee did not know the difference between a district championship and a state championship....
Six-man football, a throwback to the Depression years, is enjoying a resurgence here on the Great Plains, in a broad arc of the country curving from eastern Colorado down into the remote reaches of far West Texas. Paradoxically, the sport is growing in popularity precisely because in the past few decades these towns have been losing people.
"We used to play 11-man ball here," explained 92-year-old Cartis White, a retired cotton farmer. "But we're running out of boys."
The six-a-side game is played on a smaller field than regular football and the scoring is slightly different, with field goals counting 4 points and the value of points after touchdowns reversed. Every player is eligible to receive a pass, and the pace and high scores seem more akin to basketball.
The fans here in Ackerly -- the younger ones huddled in blankets against the wind, the older ones seated in the heated cabs of pickup trucks that ring the 80-yard field -- insist they would not go back to 11-man football even if they could.
"I love this game," said Zelda Bilbo, the principal of the elementary school. "I watch the Dallas Cowboys on TV and I think, 'What's going on there? There are just too many guys out on the field.' "
In Texas, where Friday night football is a revered institution, 84 public high schools, from Cotton Center to Lazbuddie and Sierra Blanca to Buena Vista, are now preserving the ritual by playing six-a-side football. Under state regulations for six-man ball, schools must have 79 or fewer students enrolled in grades 9 through 12. (Ackerly has 59.)
In the past 15 years, 27 schools have shifted to six-man ball and at least six more Texas schools are expected to switch next fall. Several dozen more schools in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and New Mexico have six-man teams.
Although the towns are tiny, the interest tends to be intense and some games, like the championship here, drew several hundred more people from surrounding counties.
In September, at a sort of Super Bowl exhibition of six-man football, 7,832 people turned out to watch the Mullin, Tex., Bulldogs play the Warriors of Weldona, Colo., two towns whose combined population is 343. The Colorado boys won, 58-44.
But big cities and the suburbs barely follow the sport, and many feats of athletic achievement on the small gridiron garner virtually no notice outside the farm and ranch communities where they happen.
"There are some amazing stories," said Granger Huntress, the editor and publisher of the Huntress Report, the weekly bible of six-man football in Texas.
"Petey Salaiz just eclipsed 10,000 yards rushing for his high school career this weekend," Mr. Huntress said, referring to a superstar on the Mullin Bulldogs. "It's incredible, the numbers he's running up. But nobody's talking about it, because it's six-man football."
A similar lament can be heard from the players themselves, who have no less natural talent or brawn than many schoolboys in other Texas towns where 11-man games are attended by college recruiters.
"There's not much chance of getting recognized when you play six-man, I guess," said Josh Richter of Ackerly, a 16-year-old tailback with a blond crew cut and bulging muscles who dreams of playing college ball for Texas Tech. "Not many people have ever heard of it."
On the day of the big game here, wisps of cotton from the harvest blow through the town like snow and gather on the vacant lots and near the empty buildings of Main Street.
"That there used to be the hardware store, and the building next door was a drug store with a soda fountain in it," said Laferne Webb, the assistant postmaster, pointing in the direction of some boarded-up buildings.
"There used to be a lot of stuff here, but now there's hardly nothing at all," she said of the town that is about 70 miles south of Lubbock.
In a wide region here known as Texas's Rolling Plains, all 28 counties lost population between 1980 and 1994 except Scurry County, which had a net gain of 10 people, according to United States Census figures.
At the sole surviving cotton gin in a town that used to have five, the consensus among farmers is that Ackerly has lost people because of "progress" of a sort -- farms are far more mechanized and efficient.
"It used to be that 100 acres was a good-sized family farm," said M. E. Dyer, an Ackerly resident for 72 of his 75 years. "Now my son, he's farming 1,800 acres of cotton, and that's about an average-sized farm these days."
Joe Zant, 62, paused from a battle between his swatter and a fly to add with a small laugh, "But he doesn't make any more money than if he had 80 acres."
Others said people had left the dusty plains simply because they did not need to live here anymore. "Supermarkets and paved roads, that's what did us in," Mr. White said.
As the afternoon wears on, an enormous dust storm blows in from the north, turning the big sky from blue to brown.
But none of the town's economic problems or the quickly dropping temperatures seem to matter much once it is time for the pep rally at the Sands Independent District School.
The gymnasium is packed with people of all ages and the crowd goes wild when Eric Herm, a 1992 graduate of the school whom defensive coordinator Jerry Gooch calls "the epitome of football," rises to speak.
Mr. Herm played fullback and middle linebacker and led the Mustangs to the state semifinals in 1991 before making the Abilene Christian University team as a walk-on.
"I know your heart is going 100 miles per hour right now," Mr. Herm told the Mustang players. "Every weight you lifted, every sprint you ran, every drop of sweat that came out of your head is not going to mean anything if you get beat tonight."
The Mustangs had enjoyed a ferociously successful season, winning all nine games, eight under a special "mercy rule" in six-man ball that ends the contest early if a team builds up a 45-point lead at any point after halftime. Its last five victories had been 52-6, 49-0, 49-0, 46-0 and 50-0.
Asked in the locker room why the team had done so well, the players turned solemn.
"Dedication," offered 17-year-old Dallas Hopper, a running back and linebacker.
"Attitude," said Jessie Cuellar, the team's kicker and both an offensive and defensive end.
At kickoff time, the wind is howling and the ball will not even stay on the tee. Despite the cold, it is a beautiful starry night in Texas and the moon is rising. The time for football has come.
The game starts well for the Mustangs, who score the first two touchdowns, the second one on a Dallas Hopper back-flip into the end zone.
The Mustangs carry an 18-14 lead into the locker room at halftime, but after that, fortunes turn. The game is all Klondike -- itself a powerful 9-0 team, four games won under the 45-point rule. Tanner Etheredge, a 190-pound Cougar who can run, pass and kick the ball into the end zone, turns the Mustangs' dream to nightmare, and Klondike wins, 40-24.
In the lockroom after the game, the Ackerly players are disconsolate, but all is not lost. With a 9-1 record, the team still makes the bi-district playoffs, and it is just possible they will get a rematch with the Cougars.
"You don't have a choice, guys, you have to get through this," said Billy Barnett, the head coach and high school principal. "You're going to deal with setbacks all the way through your adult life, and times like this are going to help you through it."
Outside, the fans are already talking of revenge in the playoffs.
"This town still has great spirit," said Leon Bodine, 86, a retired cotton farmer. "What's left of it does, anyway."
