High school football at Panthers’ stadium long overdue. It should happen more often
Here’s a fact about Bank of America Stadium that boggles the mind with its ridiculousness: The place has never hosted a high school football game.
The Carolina Panthers have played there hundreds of times over the stadium’s 25-year history. The Charlotte stadium has also hosted numerous college football games and soccer matches, a handful of concerts, a Billy Graham crusade and a beer festival.
But the most grassroots type of football — a high school football regular-season game — has never actually been played on the stadium’s grass. That’s an embarrassment. And in large part, that’s due to former Panthers owner Jerry Richardson treating the stadium more like a private palace than a community asset.
That changes on Sept. 5, 2020 — COVID-19 willing — when Myers Park faces Rock Hill’s South Pointe High in a “Saturday Night Lights” blockbuster on Labor Day weekend.
Organizers tell me they have decided to name the game the “Keep Pounding High School Classic,” paying homage to late Panthers linebacker Sam Mills and his famous speech. Tickets, which will cost $10, haven’t gone on sale yet.
And though the game could get canceled or moved to a different site if society’s capability to handle the coronavirus doesn’t improve over the next four months, the idea itself absolutely cannot get canceled, too.
High school football at BofA is long overdue — a library book that somehow got stuck behind a bookshelf for a couple of decades. It can’t get lost again in the viral shuffle.
If the “Keep Pounding” high school game doesn’t happen in 2020, then it still must happen in 2021, in 2022, and in every year thereafter — each year with a team from North Carolina facing one from South Carolina. When the new Panthers stadium is built sometime in the distant future, this game should migrate with it. All the best prep teams in both Carolinas should get a turn.
When David Tepper bought the Panthers in 2018, he mentioned high school football as something that should and could be held in the stadium. It almost happened last year. Now it will.
“David Tepper is committed to opening Bank of America Stadium to the community and celebrating the longstanding tradition of high school football in this region,” said Steven Drummond, the Panthers’ vice president of communications and external affairs.
‘There is no crystal ball’ for COVID-19
Drummond understands the game still faces many health-related hurdles. No one knows if football at any level will start on time in the fall.
“Although the game is scheduled and we are hopeful that it will be played, there are obviously a number of elements that need to come together before we can proceed,” he said.
I asked Que Tucker, the North Carolina High School Athletic Association commissioner, what she thought about the likelihood of prep football returning as scheduled in the fall.
“We hope it will,” Tucker said. “But we really have no idea when football can resume, or any other high school sport for that matter. Unfortunately, there is no crystal ball for this.”
But let’s think positively for a second. If the game happens, senior Drake Maye (now de-committed from Alabama and verbally committed to UNC, where his father Mark was once the quarterback) will lead Myers Park.
Maye and the Mustangs would face South Pointe, which is home to one of the best high school football programs not only in South Carolina but in the nation. It won’t make much, if any, money for the Panthers to host this game — a crowd of 20,000 in a 75,000-seat stadium would be a major success. But it would be a blast, and the sort of community outreach that an NFL team wanting a new stadium down the road would be well-advised to do more of every year.
The game has been scheduled for a Saturday night in part not to interfere with other high schools and their usual slate of Friday night games. High school football starts so early that this would actually be Myers Park’s third game of the season. But it would still be played eight days before the Panthers’ regular-season opener in Charlotte, which is Sept. 13 against the Las Vegas Raiders.
The “Keep Pounding” game is supposed to be a two-state celebration of the best of high school football, in much the same way that the Shrine Bowl is for the Carolinas’ best players each December.
“Health and safety will be the No. 1 priority,” said Riley Fields, the Panthers’ director of community relations. “But we hope to get it played on schedule, and to make it the ultimate celebration of high school football in our area.”
The coronavirus has hit the “pause” button on sports and arts entertainment throughout the world. At Bank of America Stadium, it appears almost inevitable that the Garth Brooks concert now scheduled for June 13 (and already delayed once) will be postponed again. For the Panthers, training camp in Spartanburg at Wofford College still seems like a good bet, but I also bet it will be held without fans.
State championships in BofA?
I also wish Bank of America and the Panthers would get into the rotation to host some of the N.C. high school state championship games every December. Those games are already held in NFL stadiums in several other states. North Carolina’s eight state-title games in football are traditionally held on college campuses, rotating between UNC, Duke, Wake Forest and N.C. State.
“We are perfectly happy with our college partners on those championship games,” Tucker said. “But with that said, you never say never, and we aren’t about to close the door on Bank of America Stadium. We welcome conversation with the Panthers and their powers that be about that possibility.”
I know the Charlotte stadium’s calendar is more crowded in December due to college football, but you could host as many as three high school state title games in a single day in Charlotte if you started early enough. You could also expand the “Keep Pounding” high school game into a prep doubleheader on a single September Saturday to allow twice as many players and fans to be involved.
Still, getting this first high school game in Bank of America Stadium feels like a victory.
More than 99.9% of high school football players won’t ever play in the NFL. So let’s give some of the best ones in the region a shot at playing in a pro stadium and let their fans come watch. It’s the right thing to do — both this and every year.
This story was originally published May 12, 2020 at 2:27 PM.
