Football Rebels

Clint Martin is an incoming freshman at Midwestern University, a school noted for the quality of its varsity football program. He loves to play football and even though he was not even a starter on his high school team, he tries out for the Midwestern freshman team. There are many other students who also want to try out, but were not recruited and they are all put together and taken through basic drills by one of the coaches. Then, well before the season starts, they play a scrimmage game against the freshman recruits. They lose big and that supposedly ends their football days. However, the love of the game burns brightly within Clint, so he goes to the head of intramural athletics and asks if he can form an intramural team and use the University's old abandoned football stadium. He receives permission and with the help of Shoo-Fly Finnegan, an eccentric but powerful local businessman, he puts the stadium into shape and gets uniforms donated by local businesses. His idea also catches fire at other schools, so Clint's team, now called the Rebels, get to play some games. At first they get clobbered, but after getting some quality coaching from an injured member of the varsity, they start winning. Since the quality of their game improves and there are physical and academic casualties on the varsity, Clint and his friend Yancy are asked to join the varsity. When the first-string quarterback gets booted out of the game, Clint takes over and leads his team to victory. While the themes of determination and hard work are the main plot devices of this story, there is another one about the sport of football. Throughout the book, Scholz points out that football is not just about large men pushing each other around and knocking each other down, there is a great deal of strategy and teamwork involved. To play football well, you must think and react fast and every man on the field must handle their assigned tasks. This is an excellent book about many other things besides the sport of football.

As a sports-nut kid, I adored this book. It was great sports--and it taught me there's always a way to get it done. What a treat it is to find out it's been re-released! If you love sports, if you've ever been told you can't do something, if you like to see the good guys win...READ THIS BOOK!!!P.S.--the guy who wrote this book won a gold medal in the Olympics, so he really *knows* sports!