CONCORDIA, Illinois. The walls and the rafters of the high school gym in this small downstate town are festooned with banners representing conference, district and state championships won by the boys' sports teams, the Cougars, a symbol of pride for local residents.
Cougar Pride!
"Kids here grow up dreaming of playing football or basketball when they get to high school," says local feed and seed dealer Lloyd Knox. "It's just part of their heritage."
"That's it--let him get behind you!"
And yet Concordia, as the smallest school in the widely-dispersed Tri-County League, hasn't had a winning season in any sport besides bass fishing in over a decade. "We know we can't compete with Champaign, or Urbana, or Champaign-Urbana," Knox says. "So we tell our kids you've got to find what you're good at and stick to it. That's a good life lesson."
The Cougar Marching Band
What the Concordia Cougars excel at is being good losers, and the banners represent "sportsmanship" awards handed out by league officials to keep smaller schools from cancelling their athletic programs and concentrating on academics. "It's like in college, when you hope the dumb kids don't drop out of chemistry or whatever," says Holcomb Blasdale, volunteer commissioner for the Tri-County League. "You need somebody to keep the curve down to a reasonable level."
"A spectacular dropped pass!"
Cougar athletes are taught to go out of their way to give opponents the benefit of the doubt in any contested situation. "When a kid on the other team signals for a fair catch, he's basically running up the white flag of surrender," says head football coach Wilber Rees. "If he drops the ball, we think you ought to give him a chance to pick it up before you just pummel him."
"Have I done everything I could to prepare my kids to lose graciously today?"
This Geneva Convention approach to interscholastic athletics has won Concordia--which means "place of peace" in Latin--many fans in other towns in the region. "The people from Concordia are so nice and pleasant," says Lu Anne Diggs of Waverly, Illinois. "We just love when they come to town--it helps our kids' self-esteem to beat somebody by twenty points without breaking a sweat."
As spring competition begins, Concordia Athletic Director Dirk Powell hopes his teams can again achieve a "hat trick"--worst record and best sportsmanship in the three major sports, football, basketball and baseball. "My only regret is that we don't play hockey here," he says. "Then we'd have a grand-slam."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
