Jeremy Speer

Next Friday, the lights will shine at football stadiums across the landscape as the season kicks off in earnest.

As this sign of the shifting season comes upon us, I think of one of the rites of passage of the high school team member — the bus ride. Football, marching band, cheerleading, volleyball, cross-country, tennis, soccer and more, their participants will all dot the highways of Ohio nearly every afternoon traveling here, there and everywhere for away competitions.

I laugh because in Ohio, I’ve noticed two, and only two, types of schools. You have a little urban oasis in a city, small or large, surrounded by a neighborhood or possibly an enclave of businesses. Then you have those schools that pop out of nowhere — equally impressive buildings that beckon like a mirage amid never-ending corn or soybean fields.

As the wheels on the bus go around and around to these places, I think back to my own experience. There’s nothing like being part of a team, and one of the more universal experiences of team life is traveling to competitions.

It’s a rite of passage, but my passage was the Oregon Trail compared to modest 30-minute jaunts to the next county that make up a majority of local schools’ travels.

I grew up in a town that currently has just over 10,000 people. In Northern Michigan, that was a metropolis, as the nearest city with more people was over 125 miles away, all on a two-lane road. My entire county of roughly 30,000 was covered by my school district, creating a vast and large school. I grew up in the city center, but two of my best friends each lived 30 minutes away in opposite directions.

Big school plus very few big towns in proximity meant we had to travel, and I mean travel, to find similar-sized competition.

During football season, this meant a lot of miles. Our season always opened against a pair of schools in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Escanaba and Marquette, alternating home and away games. Both were more than five hours away. On days we traveled to these locations, we would check into school around 8, and before ever setting foot in a classroom, we’d hop on the bus and head north. About halfway, sometime after crossing the mammoth Mackinac Bridge, we’d stop at a rest stop. There, we would eat paper bag lunches and do a 15-minute stretch. Then it was on down the road for another couple hours of remote driving.

We’d get to the stadium plenty early, and do an extended warmup prior to the game. Traveling that far required a lot of exercises to shake off the jet lag.

During my final couple of years, a few families would get hotel rooms after the game, as we’d make a weekend of our fun excursion.

Football fits nicely into the weekend calendar with Friday night games followed by no school for a few days.

But playing other sports means weekday games, and in my league, it meant really late bedtimes.

Marquette and Escanaba were the furthest we’d go, but the closest school in our conference was over an hour away. One school was nearly three hours away, and when we would play there on a week-day, it was not uncommon to return home after 1 a.m., knowing I’d have to be up by 7 the next morning to get to school.

This was in the days prior to cell phones and laptops, too, so we’d learn to do our homework on the way to the event, and played many a card game on the way back.

Playing a high school sport is a true commitment for anyone, but if you were to play at Alpena High School, it was a commitment to spending hours upon hours on a bus. As kids who didn’t know any better, however, we didn’t complain. We just enjoyed being around our friends and listening to spinning CDs on the Discman.

These days, when I hear kids groan about traveling an hour to a game in a far-away land, I smile. If the bus had stopped during my high school career an hour into the trip, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I wouldn’t have even been halfway done with “99 bottles of beer on the wall…”

Jeremy Speer is the group publisher of The Courier, Findlay, the Sandusky Register, The Advertiser-Tribune, Tiffin, the Norwalk Reflector and Review Times, Fostoria. He can be reached at jeremyspeer@thecourier.com.