When I think of Brainerd High School football this year, I think of a childhood book favorite: “The Little Engine That Could.”
You know: “I think I can, I think I can. I know I can” — insurmountable odds and the belief that one can overcome.
Never mind that the Panthers are playing with outdated equipment, that their weight-room facilities are antiquated and in need of repair, that they get along somehow without an athletic trainer or training equipment, that their locker rooms haven’t been updated since the school was built or that their coach gets by in a windowless cubbyhole with no air conditioning.
Pretty much stiffed by most of the male students at the school, coach Stanley Jackson and his staff are playing with slightly more than two dozen youngsters. To get to the postseason was a moral victory, and then for the Panthers to win their first playoff game gives credence to Jackson’s belief that he is doing the right things in the right way.
Yet Brainerd is, in certain aspects, a poor program, so much so that a gift of three new game balls two years ago was hoarded until this season.