There's no crying in football by Josh Meltzer

An hour earlier Salem high school’s football team had advanced to the state championship game. In a few hours Virginia Tech would take the field against Florida State in the ACC championship game.

In between the two stadium games, seven boys and a 20-year-old who all live at the Laurel Ridge Apartments in Roanoke play a championship game of their own in a sloped field off of Shenandoah Avenue Northwest. Quinton Leftwich, 10, makes a fast run straight towards the older and bigger Brian Napper, 13 (right) who delivers a quick tackle (in photo).

In their game there are no referees, but there are rules.

-- Brothers have to cover each other. “Brother to brother?” 10-year-old Quinton Leftwich playfully teases his 20-year-old brother from across the line of scrimmage. “Yeah,” his brother answers, “Brother to brother.”

-- All plays end in a tackle.

“When you get hit that’s how we get kids buff out here. We say, ‘you gotta eat it,’” explains Bryon Redding, 14, about the benefits of tackle football. But he says he and the other older kids temper themselves when tackling the smaller ones.

“We hit them gently,” he says.

-- And the most important rule: No crying. Though only half their size, 6-year-old Koron Pate runs the ball as far as he can until tackled hard by 15-year-old Antonio Waker. When the other boys crowd around Pate to check on him, tears well up in his eyes. “Eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it” they chant.

“That means you gotta take the hit,” Pate says.

Add a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)