When I went to cover Marysville’s football game last Friday night, I walked into Dublin Coffman Stadium and realized something — I hate Dublin Coffman Stadium.
It has nothing to do with the turf, the lights or the hotdogs. It’s my own personal hang-up.
That stadium is where, in 1989, I played my last high school football game. Compared to everywhere else we played, it was massive — tall light poles, huge bleachers and a scoreboard that blared music through speakers clear enough that you could actually understand the lyrics.
The team was big also. Not just physically, but in the sheer number of players. It was perhaps the only high school team I can recall that had duplicate numbers, because apparently they were at, or approaching, triple digits in athletes on the team. Back in those days Dublin was just one high school, and it was huge. The district wouldn’t add a second high school until Dublin Scioto in 1995. The third, Jerome, was built in 2004.
The old Central Buckeye League was a pretty ridiculous gaggle of teams. It was a bunch of small schools and Dublin. Olentangy was in there, but at the time it was a small district of one high school – nowhere near the four-high-school behemoth of today.
Marysville was also obviously much smaller at the time, but was big in comparison to some of the schools such as North Union, Jonathan Alder and Buckeye Valley.
As I recall, Dublin was supposed to win the league that year, but started the season 0-4. But once they got to league play, they started steamrolling teams. When we showed up for the last game of the season, we were just fresh asphalt and got drilled 27-6. There was another team in the league with one loss, so we had a chance to create a tie for the league title.
But we didn’t. As I took a knee, exhausted, after the game I could barely hear the words of coach Rich Weiskircher, because they were blasting Queen’s “We are the Champions” in crystal clarity over those (expletive deleted) high-dollar speakers as their team and student section celebrated.
I’ve hated that song, and apparently, that stadium ever since.
The funny thing about the story is the detail in which I can remember my high school football days. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about graduation or prom. I even have trouble remembering a lot of things from more recent years, but I can remember so many sights and smells and feelings from football.
I remember the vinegary stink of sweat soaked shoulder pads.
I remember the ache in my shins during camp my sophomore year when our practice field was like dusty concrete because it hadn’t rained in weeks.
I remember cowbells clunking in the home stands.
I remember the sound of our cleats as they clicked against asphalt, then thumped against the rubber mat covering the track, before going silent as we ran onto the grass of the field before the game.
I remember the plastic taste of the water that came out of our practice field water station, which was a hose secured to a piece of PVC pipe with holes poked in it, supported by some sawhorses.
I remember playing on London’s old field, where extra points went over the uprights and out onto the nearby road.
I remember stretching before a game at Buckeye Valley, in a cold, drizzly rain that seemed to be forming into ice on the ground around my hand.
I remember so much of it, which is amazing, and really goes to show the impact the game had on my teenage years. I wish I had really stopped to appreciate what was going on around me and recognized what I would miss when it was gone.
I hope the players on Marysville’s football team, and all the local athletes, can absorb the unique sounds, images and even odors of the high school gridiron so that they, too, can look back one day and realize how much they hate Dublin Coffman Stadium.
-Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune.