Thanks for all the endorsements...having done this exact thing and published an award winning paper on it I did offer some advice much like a few have suggested already. He will have advisors that are probably saying the same things. They like smaller focus ideas...15 pages in nothing to sneeze at but also a lot can be done with a narrow focus...a team, a season, a town history wrapped around the game are good examples. Local is good bc you have easy access to sources, but now bc research is so much easier with databases it doesnt have to be. Picking a topic with living participants would be great for content to help give first hand perspective and eat up the word count. There is also a big difference in if it is a BA level or MA level paper. BA level should be a narrow history...a topic I think would be great and you can get great primary resources is the first state championship season and O'Brien in 1972. An example of a larger scale MA type paper would be research say Stephen Epler, the 1930s and rural America and tie in how and why 6man was needed and what it meant socially on a broader sense, how it represented that time an space in American history. Or why 6man decreased in popularity as it relates to the state of the nation in the 1950s as society moved from rural to urban areas...there are some great papers to be written out there and hopefully he has good advisors to guide him...I had great ones
I will see if Mike would be able to publish my research paper on the site that way anyone can read it and mine it for sources...that is a pro tip...read past works and look at and read their sources...save you time in searching blindly.
