On small-town football (and toughness) in the wake of disasters

The Los Angeles Times has recently run two stories about small-town football teams in the Golden State, each one in the process of recovering from a disaster.  Trona High, on the edge of Death Valley,  straddling Inyo and San Bernardino County, was near the epicenter of earthquakes in early July.  Read more here.  Paradise High is recovering from the Camp Fire of November, 2018, which destroyed nearly the entire town.  Read more here.  

Dan Wharton reports for the LA Times from Trona, population 1,900, under the headline, "Trona High’s once-mighty Sandmen fight to keep football alive in wake of earthquakes." Here's a poignant depiction of the city:

At least in the old days the school fielded big squads, all those miners’ sons eager to prove themselves on Friday night. They forged a reputation for toughness, scratching out wins, even contending for an occasional championship. 

That was before the local processing plant laid off hundreds of workers, leaving this remote community littered with abandoned homes, forcing the grocery and furniture store out of business. The Ridgecrest earthquakes last month scared off even more people. 

Now the once-powerful Trona program, which downsized to eight-man football a while back, is scrambling to attract enough bodies for its fall schedule.

The story about the Paradise football team win on August 23 is by the Associated Press, and an excerpt follows:

It’s hard to recognize Paradise. 

It is heaps of melted metal. It is scorched pine trees. It is a place where things used to be, before a fire destroyed nearly 19,000 structures and killed 86 people in November 2018. 

But on Friday night, Paradise looked like home again. Thousands of people filled the stands at Om Wraith Field at Paradise High School — which was spared from the flames — to watch the football team missing more than a third of its players play its first game since losing everything. 

Girls wore ribbons in their hair and glitter on their faces. Boys wore jerseys with the sleeves rolled up. People stood in line to order hot dogs at the concession stand, only to be given a paper plate with a bun and told to walk around the corner and pick one off the grill.

Paradise's current population is just over 2,000, though it was more than 26,000 before the Camp Fire. 

It's interesting how sports--perhaps especially football--become symbolic of so much else about community and place, especially when it comes to small towns.