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Photojournalistas.com |
| Sept/Oct, 2002 |
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Part-Time Gladiators - Page 1
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 "I don’t go to Church on Sunday, I play football. Football is my church, it helps keep me sane the rest of the week" Jean St. Amand’s declaration may sound just a little bit over the top but in many ways it helps explain the growing popularity of a little known level of football most commonly described as semi-pro. Jean St. Amand plays for one of the teams that fall under the banner of semi-pro football, the Beachside Tomcats of Old Orchard Beach, Maine. During the course of their season the Tomcats and hundreds of other semi-pro teams across America battle for yardage on football fields that range from those inside stadiums in immaculate condition to the practice field that is little more than mowed grass with painted lines and two goal posts.Every year as the football season draws to a close on high school and college playing fields across North America thousands of dreams of playing in the pros come to an end. Those that had no illusions of playing in the pros also find themselves saying goodbye to a brutal sport that they love playing. Most of these players will walk away from football when that final season concludes, content to watch sports television or play in softball and flag football leagues to quench their thirst for sport and competition. A certain few will not settle for this, the restless need for an arena in which they can push their bodies and each other to the limit or throw one more "Hail Mary" is overwhelming. Those few, sooner or later, eventually find out about semi-pro and find their way to one of the teams in this little know level of football.  Semi-Pro Football, Minor League Football, Amateur Football are just a few of the assorted names used to describe this level of football, which is composed of between 500 to 600 teams across North America. Most of these teams play in regional leagues that encompass states or clusters of states. When the regular season is over league champions and highly ranked teams play each other until the two survivors play in a national championship game. Like world titles in boxing, there is usually more than one national champion, depending upon which national organization a team or league is affiliated with. In the six New England states there are two men’s leagues, and they serve as microcosm of how leagues function across the United States and Canada.The Eastern Football League (EFL) and the New England Football League (NEFL) are completely separate entities and they have no inter-league play. During the 2001 season, the focus of this story, the NEFL had two different conferences within its structure. The North Atlantic Conference consists of teams from the Northern New England states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, while the Colonial Conference is made up of larger teams from New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The rules of play for these two conferences are the same but the requirements to play are not. The North Atlantic Conference has newer teams that are not as established as the Colonial Conference teams to the south. The North Atlantic Conference teams also do not carry as many players as those in the Colonial Conference and have different criteria for the kind of fields that they play on (i.e. practice fields vs. fields with lights and scoreboards). |
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