Football has been woven into my life for as long as I can remember. Some kids grow up with books. Some grow up with music. I grew up with brothers, and that meant games—usually rough ones. Chuck, Tom, Dave, John… they weren’t gentle mentors. They were older, stronger, and more than willing to turn any backyard, field, or snowbank into a makeshift gridiron. Even our small bedrooms were fair game. We played football in the summer heat and in the frozen winters of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. It didn’t matter if there were yard markers or bleachers—if there was space, there was football.

By the time I entered high school, the game already felt like a second home. I loved everything about it—the physicality, the team camaraderie, the strategy, the thrill of a perfect tackle, the satisfaction of pushing through exhaustion when your body begged you to quit. Football taught me discipline before I ever knew the word. And as soon as I stepped onto the field as a freshman, I knew I wanted all four years of it.

During my adolescence, New Lisbon High School may not have had the biggest or strongest team in the state—or even in our own conference—but we had heart. And we had conditioning. And we had coaches who believed that if we couldn’t out-muscle our opponents, we were sure as heck going to out-work them. We were also known as a "basketball town" and some of our better athletes stayed away from football to focus on basketball.

Our team was part of the North Scenic Central Conference, a league of small schools smack dab in the middle of southern Wisconsin. We were often the smallest team physically. While some schools had boys who looked like they were carved out of oak, we had wiry, tough kids who didn’t know when to back down. Our coaches understood what that meant: if size wasn’t our advantage, conditioning had to be. Technique had to be. Toughness had to be. And so our practices were built around one central philosophy:

No one will out-hit us

and no one will out-condition us.

Simple. Brutal. Effective.

If you’ve ever watched "Remember the Titans" or "Friday Night Lights", you’ll get some sense of our practice culture. Hard hitting. Endless conditioning. Sweat stinging your eyes. Dust sticking to your skin. Coaches barking. Bodies colliding. And the thrill—yes, the thrill—of pushing through when you were dead tired but still standing.

The Hardest Hits Came From Our Own Teammates

People often assume that the biggest hits in football come during games. That might be true in big stadiums with lights, crowds, and college scouts. But in high school, especially in our high school, the hardest hits always came in practice.

We had some teammates who could really “lay the wood,” as the coaches liked to say. These guys weren’t huge, but they were fearless. They hit with everything they had, every time, even in drills. You learned quickly to keep your head up, stay low, and brace for impact.

I took some of the biggest hits of my life in our own practices. And I delivered a few, too. That’s how we learned. That’s how we toughened up. That’s how we made each other better. I specifically remember a drill where I was one-on-one against one of our better linebackers and my directive was to carry the football past him between the two pylons. The pylons were set about 10 feet apart. I could have tried to fake one way and run around him, but I had it in. my mind that I was going to run "right through him". We met head-on and the sound the helmets made could easily be heard on the other side of the field. I kept practicing but I'm sure I had a concussion.

Other teams noticed. We’d hear comments after games:

“Man, you guys hit harder than anyone.”

“You’re the toughest team we’ve played.”

“You guys don’t stop.”

Those comments stuck with me more than any scoreboard ever did.

The Drills That Would Probably Be Illegal Today

Looking back, some of our training methods would probably raise eyebrows—or lawsuits—today. But in the 1970s, football was a different world, especially in small-town Wisconsin. And honestly… we loved it.

We had a drill where we jogged in place while the coaches blew the whistle. At the whistle, we’d drop flat onto our stomachs, pop back up, and start jogging again. Then drop again. And again. And again. Sometimes dozens of times. Sometimes hundreds.

We had the “gauntlet,” where players lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on two sides while one poor soul ran between them and absorbed hit after hit after hit. It was like running through a human car wash, except instead of foam rollers, you had teenagers with aggression to burn.

There were drills where we ran until our legs shook. Drills where we crawled. Drills where we dove. Drills where we smashed into tackling dummies—anything that didn’t move.

And then there was the monkey drill. I hadn’t thought about that one in years. Players lay down side by side, and one at a time we hopped over the line—over shoulders, legs, backs—rolling horizontally like a human wave. It was equal parts ridiculous and exhausting.

Then there were push-ups. Endless push-ups. Push-ups for mistakes. Push-ups for fun. Push-ups when the coach felt we needed “a little more fire.” Push-ups in the sun. Push-ups in the mud. If push-ups built character, our team had more character than the entire conference combined.

Water Wasn’t a Right—It Was a Reward

Today’s athletes have water breaks scheduled at precise intervals. Hydration is science.

In our day, water was motivation.

“You want water?”

“You’ve got to earn it.”

We learned to push through thirst. To keep running when our tongues felt like sandpaper. To ignore the dry rasp in our throats. Again, not healthy by modern standards—but it built a mental toughness I still carry to this day.

Two-A-Days: Where Boys Became Men

If the regular practices were tough, the dreaded two-a-days were something else entirely. Two weeks before school began in the fall, football practice started. Morning practice. Afternoon practice. Heat rising off the grass. Helmets baking in the sun. By the end of a session, your clothes felt like wet towels and your legs were heavy as concrete.

But here’s the thing: two-a-days bonded us. They created something that went deeper than skill or strength. When you suffer together, you grow together. You trust each other. You learn who will quit and who won’t.

Football taught me how far I could push myself. It taught me resilience. It taught me the difference between pain and injury, between discomfort and danger, between “I want to quit” and “I will not quit.” I played with broken bones, cracked ribs, sprained ankles. One year I had to have my knees drained of fluid before each game on Friday night so they would be more flexible and bend.

The Rivalries and the Conference Battles

We were part of the North Scenic Central Conference, and it was stacked with strong teams. Year after year, we faced schools like DeSoto, Cashton, Kickapoo, and Westby—programs that seemed to produce big, tough boys like clockwork. In fact the first High School championship in Wisconsin was during my senior year in 1976. In our class, DeSoto won.

Before conference play, we had two non-conference games against teams from the South Central side— typically Wonewok and LaFarge. Those teams were good, but we usually beat them. It's funny how I remember Wonewok or LaFarge winning their conference and New Lisbon ending up near the lower tier of our conference. Parity was not a thing back then. Those wins gave us confidence heading into the meat grinder of our own conference, where every week felt like a street fight.

We weren’t the biggest team. We weren’t always the fastest. But we were relentless. When other teams came to play us, they left knowing they had been in a battle. Our coaches made sure of that.

Why Football Still Means So Much to Me

When I look back on those years—from freshman to senior year—I don’t just remember the games. I remember the practices. The hits. The drills. The laughs. The bruises. The feeling of walking off the field completely exhausted but strangely proud.

Football shaped me. It toughened me. It taught me how to work hard when no one was watching. It taught me how to push through pain and fear and doubt. It taught me discipline. It taught me teamwork. It taught me how to trust the person next to me.

And most of all, it taught me something about myself:

I could take a hit.

I could get back up.

I could keep going.

Those lessons have never left me. Not in my career. Not in my relationships. Not in the hard seasons of life.

High school football may seem like a small chapter in the grand story of a person’s life—but for me, it was a foundational one. And the echoes of those practices, those drills, those hits… they’re still with me all these years later.