It's the most beautiful time of the year. High school football is back — the Friday (or Thurs-day) night lights. The popcorn, the pep bands, and of course, the most important thing: The games.
There's nothing quite like it in this football-crazy state, whether you're lining up with five of your teammates for a six-man game in Crawford, or jogging onto the brand-new turf at Lincoln's Seacrest Field. Or playing in front of an all-time sunset, like Norris and Waverly did last season in the photo you see on the cover of the Journal Star's 2024 prep football preview. That was a beauty of a game, by the way.
Waverly won 27-22. Everywhere you turn, there is beauty on the gridiron. There's beauty in the brutish, like the play of Omaha North defensive lineman Tyson Terry.
"I think it's really just going around and smashing dudes' faces in," Terry said of what he loves most about the game. "You can't get in trouble out there. You can just friggin' crush people, and that's just what I like doing.
" Blunt force is a good way to be a good player, and no one is better at it than Terry, a Nebraska commit who will also go down as one of the best high school wrestlers Nebraska has ever had. He has yet to lose a high school wrestling match, and likely won't as a senior, either. Now the goal is to pile up more wins in the fall.
"We open up with (defending champion Omaha) Westside, and I love that," Terry said. "It's at Westside, and those are just things I think about every day when I'm training. I think about those games being on TV — bigger games, getting to the playoffs.
I'm really excited, I'm pumped up." There's also the beauty of having pride in representing your school and your community. Terry is a fourth-generation Omaha North Viking, and has a Viking tattoo on his back to prove it.
Pulling on the uniform, after the many family members who came before him did the same, means a little more. It's really important to me," Terry said. "The blue and yellow, that's just what I bleed.
I've grown up at North. It really means a lot." Get local news delivered to your inbox!.
