Football

It only took me three months into my sports writing career to do my first historical football piece. Of course, anyone who has been a sports writer in Franklin County or the North Quabbin Region has done at least one retrospective - and usually that was on an annual Thanksgiving Day game.

My first venture into something more, however, did not happen until 1998. It was that fall when standout Turners' running back Topher Prondecki was about to break Bob Watroba's school, single-season rushing record. Someone up in the Powertown had sent then-Recorder sportswriter Cameron Ward a list of the school's 1,000-yard rushers. Once I saw that information, I immediately started asking questions:

"How many schools have had 1,000-yard rushers?
"Who is the area's all-time single-season rushing leader?
"What school has had the most 1,000-yard rushers?

Questions were flying around with very few answers so, starting with the Turners information and players I actually saw break the grand barrier, I once again ventured into the world of microfilm to try and find my answers. Although there were a number of obstacles in my way, with help from many sources and a lot of caffeine, on Nov. 11, 1998, The Recorder ran for the first time ever a list of all 1,000-yard rushers our area has ever had.

While doing this research, I also unearthed some more interesting facts and decided to delve even further. As of now, I have come up with several different statistical categories including, but not limited to:

Thanksgiving Day results
Super Bowl results and memories
1,000-yard rushers
Most rushing yards in single game
Yearly scoring champions
Most points in a single game

Football is perhaps the hardest sport to keep statistics for. Unlike in college and the professional ranks where fields are perfectly lined, local high schools fields are not which means yardage gained is basically up to the individual covering the game.

Another category I found hard to research was point leaders. In the early days, usually around mid week, writers at The Recorder would pen a brief feature on who the top scorers in the area where to go along with a small listing of these same players. Budget, time and space restraints soon forced writers to do away with the feature and just run a list of scoring leaders on the Scoreboard Page. As time has gone on even this practice was hard to keep up with in certain years. Full boxscores that can be seen currently did not run in The Recorder until the early 1990s. More football teams and less reporters to cover them all was a major obstacle in maintaining point leaders while, in some cases, freelance writers did not do boxscores at all. These factors, along with the increase of other fall sports, limited the amount of information that could be found for some years. While information was limited, other sources were used to help identify every scoring champion from 1966 on to help make that section of this site as accurate as possible.

As with any research project, you have to have a starting point and for this section of the site, I chose to go with my lifetime - 1966 until present. So PLEASE, no emails about this guy from 1962 or what about that guy from 1947. For now my football research is confined until all information from these years is complete.