Football at Northeastern High School a Reality

Sit back for a moment and try to imagine a typical Friday night in Pennsylvania. It doesn’t have to be any specific location.

Fans are buying tickets, filing into stadiums, and finding their seats in aluminum bleachers. They are cheering their team to victory — or booing the refs for a bad call.

Every touchdown scored, except for those in the third quarter, draws the strains of the school’s fight song or victory march.

Now, imagine having none of that on a Friday night for the past 50 years. Does it seem kind of hard to imagine? If you answered yes, there’s one school district in Pennsylvania that had to live without football for 50 years.

But, on August 29, the fans of the Northeastern York High School, in Manchester, York County, will finally see a football game played at its campus.

Northeastern had been the largest PIAA-affiliated program to never have a football program. When the Bobcats take the field against East Juniata, that dubious title will be removed.

“We’re expecting upwards of 5,000 people at that (East Juniata) game,” said Joseph Griffith, the man responsible for bringing football to Manchester.

By day, Griffith is a walking mail carrier for the United States Postal Service.

When he removes the blue uniform, it’s all orange and black for the former 20-year member of the Army.

“The story of bringing football to Northeastern could someday be made into a movie,” Griffith said.

He isn’t lying, either. It’s a story that might seem too good to be true, like one of those fishing stories, except this one is very, very real.

“Back in September 2003, the Northeastern Football Association went to the school board and requested that football be brought into the district,” Griffith said.

The members of the association were given a tough assignment: reach a $250,000 threshold, and do it exclusively from private funding.

The school board said the football association would have to bankroll the first three seasons of Bobcat football, and then they would support it after that.

Why all private funding? The Northeastern School District is one of the highest tax bases in all of York County. Raising a quarter-million dollars from an increase in taxes would have been a big mistake to folks sore over already-high taxes.

Griffith had gotten elected to the school board in November of 2004, and he asked the superintendent at the time about what was going on with the efforts to bring football to NE.

When he went to a meeting in March of 2005, nearly a year and a half after the school board gave their decision, the association had only raised $5,000 and seemed to hit a brick wall.

“At that time, I volunteered as their campaign manager,” Griffith said. “And I told them I would raise half the funds needed in one year.”

Envelopes for donations and pledges went all over the mail curcuit, even to Happy Valley. That envelope was addressed to Joe Paterno.

But things didn’t look good. It had been three months since Griffith sent out the forms and he hadn’t heard a response.

Then, one day, he got a phone call from Happy Valley. It was Joe Paterno.

“He said he couldn’t donate money because of a potential NCAA violation,” Griffith said, “but he did express his support and said it would only be a matter of time before things came around.”

Three days later, a local business pledged $5,000 per year for three years. And from there, the wheels began turning. Donations poured in left and right, and by Thanksgiving of 2005, Griffith had raised $100,000 in cash and pledges.

“At Christmas, one individual gave $50,000,” he said.

Feeling on Cloud 9, Griffith and the football association went back to the school board meeting in February of 2006 with $151,000 in cash and pledges, plus a $70,000 line of credit provided by a local Sovereign Bank.

By a 5-4 vote, the board approved that football be brought to the school, but made the stipulation that the remaining $29,000 had to be raised within the next 27 days, or football would have to wait another year.

With just five days left in February, Griffith was still short of the goal by a few thousand dollars. When word got out that time was growing thin, donors responded once again.

All told, in those final 27 days, Griffith raised $53,000 in cash and pledges.

He officially hit the $250,000 cash mark Tuesday, July 2.

Football at Northeastern would become a reality after all.

“The community has really come around,” Griffith said. “There were a lot of nay-sayers at the beginning because they didn’t think it could be done.

“Now, they’re saying, ‘Hey, we can’t complain one bit because it didn’t cost us a penny.'”

And Northeastern has already had some pretty big football accomplishments, even if it hasn’t played a varsity game yet.

For Northeastern’s first freshman football game, 3,000 people packed the Bobcat’s 1,100-seat stadium.

The Bobcats’ jayvee team spanked Harrisburg, a “AAAA” school, 26-6, and defeated York Suburban in Leader Heights a year after suffering a 36-6 pasting at home.

“People have asked me why I did this,” Griffith said.

“I told them it was the right thing to do.”