At Stroke of Midnight, North Football Tackles a New Season
At 12:01 AM on Monday morning, the Polar Bears were ready to take the practice field.
Besides helmets, pads and cleats, why did the checklist for anybody going out for football at North High School include a sleeping bag?
Today is the first official day of preseason camp for DMPS high school football teams. Last night, while their metro rivals were presumably getting well-rested for this morning’s opening drills, the North Polar Bears got the jump on everybody by holding their first practice during “Midnight Madness,” a radical departure from standard operating procedure at the school that won’t be the last, according to second-year head coach Keith Hanks. The SOP most commonly associated with North football in recent years is defeat. Wins have been few and far between. In Coach Hanks’ first season the Polar Bears won one game. But he remains undaunted about the task confronting him.
“I’m a rebuilder,” he declared while some 60 players were assembling late Sunday night and getting outfitted. “I did some research and from what I can tell North has sent more players to the NFL than any of the other Des Moines high schools,” Hanks pointed out.
When Hanks was hired at Sibley-Ocheyedan in 1999 he became the first African-American head football coach at an Iowa high school. Congratulations, Coach! He inherited a program that had lost 36 straight. In each of his last two years at the school the record was 6-3.
Omens abounded during Midnight Madness, from the moment the lights flipped on at John R. Grubb Stadium and lit up an otherwise quiet Sunday night on the north side. Upbeat music blared from the PA system as the players reported to the field. The scene was rimmed by an intermittent bank of distant lightning. When the squad got into formation at 12:01 A.M. for a series of stretching calisthenics one of the coaches hollered out, “Wake up the neighborhood!” and the unison cadence of the players immediately amplified. The lightning, perfectly, was approaching from the north.
What did his troops think about starting workouts at midnight on a Sunday evening?
“They were charged up about the idea,” Coach Hanks reported. “They can’t wait to get started.” And neither could he.
Thunderstorms are no match for Hanks. When they arrived he was ready for them, having arranged to have the whole campus at the team’s disposal for an overnight lockdown. After practice, whether outdoors or forced into the gym, everybody stayed together for an exercise in teambuilding. Besides their workout the players shared what amounted to a team retreat, playing video games and generally bonding for the long season ahead. By the time their opponents were taking the field for the first time Monday morning, the headstarting Polar Bears were calling it a night, a good long one under the direction of the rebuilder
Their opener is at home on August 30 vs. Council Bluffs Thomas Jefferson. On September 27 they’ll host Sioux City North, Hanks’ last coaching stop and a school he took to the state playoffs.
By then the neighborhood should be wide awake.
