Full Description
Winner of the 2025 Spur Award
Finalist for the 2024 American Writing Awards
No Friday Night Lights is the story of a rural Nevada high school football team that never wins. Veteran reporter John M. Glionna examines the 2022 season in which the McDermitt Bulldogs practiced for weeks in the summer only to learn once again that they had come up short of the necessary players due to the dwindling population on the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation on the Nevada-Oregon border.
Eight-man football helps give the coaches and kids a sense of community-despite a lack of wins, and despite their home's status as one of the most remote locations for a public school in the West. Glionna's relationships with coaches, players, parents-and even those McDermitt residents remotely connected to high school football-provide telling insights into local lives, many of them from the Paiute and Shoshone tribes of Fort McDermitt. Although victory and recognition elude the players, Glionna illuminates their hard work and dedication-leaving the reader with glimpses of life on the ground in "flyover" country.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Glenn Stout
Introduction by Ron Kantowski
1. Chapter One
2. Chapter Two
3. Chapter Three
4. Chapter Four
5. Chapter Five
6. Chapter Six
7. Chapter Seven
8. Chapter Eight
9. Chapter Nine
10. Chapter Ten
11. Chapter Eleven
12. Chapter Twelve
13. Chapter Thirteen
14. Chapter Fourteen
15. Chapter Fifteen
16. Chapter Sixteen
17. Chapter Seventeen
18. Chapter Eighteen
19. Chapter Nineteen
20. Chapter Twenty
21. Chapter Twenty-One
22. Chapter Twenty-Two
23. Chapter Twenty-Three
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
