Paradise Found: A High School Football Team's Rise from the Ashes
Issue No. 526 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a contender for my 2022 book-of-the-year honors. (It’s a poignant page-turner.) And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for my new blog, Pails in Comparison (PIC), with shorter book reviews of his latest “PICs.”
No. No. No Way. (Way!)
Last week, after reading the prologue and the first chapter of Paradise Found—I couldn’t put it down. Literally. Even though I’m “retired” (whatever that means), I took the day “off”—and read the book in one day. Never done that before.
Los Angeles Times sports columnist Bill Plaschke has gifted us with a stunning book, Paradise Found: A High School Football Team’s Rise from the Ashes. On Nov. 8, 2018, the friendly folks in Paradise, California, watched their town burn to the ground at the rate of 80 acres per minute. The devasting toll:
• 84 lives lost!
• In a day, the population dropped from 26,800 to 2,034!
• 20,000 burned-out cars, 19,000 homes lost!
Of the 104 football players, 95 of the Paradise High School Bobcats had lost their homes. A playoff game for the next night was cancelled. Coaches, athletes, faculty, students, and parents—lives and futures in total disarray. Could the town and the team recover? No way.
Paradise, a mountain village in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains (90 miles north of Sacramento and 12 miles east of Chico), was also the home of the right person at the right time: Head Football Coach Rick Prinz. A former youth pastor with a master’s degree from Biola University, he discovered his calling was coaching.
Bill Plaschke’s narrative launches like a James Bond movie. You’re in those cars and trucks fleeing the fires—nearby propane tanks are exploding while students arrive at school and parents arrive at workplaces. What to do? For many:
• No time.
• No time to return home and pack.
• No cell phone connection to family members.
• No carpool lane—jammed, bumper to bumper traffic. Chaos!
• No escape route—heavy, suffocating smoke.
• No chance to get gas. Yikes.
• No way.
But earlier that morning, before the panic and evacuation, Coach Rick Prinz was still hopeful. At 8:10 a.m., he texted the varsity team that football practice would still begin at 3:00 p.m. No way.
In a flash, everything changed and—trust me—you won’t skip a page in this page-turner. Eventually, some families moved to San Diego and to Arizona and some to nearby Chico—but snagging even a modest apartment was nearly impossible. Could the team and the town recover? Would there be a 2019 football season—perhaps a revenge/redemption mission? No way.
But…the coach with the calling prayed. And in borrowed buildings and a distant hope and more prayer, the high school rose from the ashes: Paradise Found. Kinda. The powerful themes in this breathtaking account prompt both hallelujahs and tears. (Last week, I tried to read several poignant paragraphs to my wife, Joanne. No way. Too choked up.)
Fast forward to February 2019 and the school’s new location in an industrial warehouse in Chico. However. “Once school restarted…many of the teens drifted away or just plain disappeared. They couldn’t take the ninety-minute drive from some distant town where they lived in some tiny mobile home. Some of them moved out of state. Some of them couldn’t get out of bed.” Most lived within a three-hour radius of the new school location “…in a variety of accommodations—apartments, trailers, rental homes, hotels—that were paid through insurance or life savings. The players were everywhere and nowhere.”
In 2018, the varsity squad was 76 strong. Now…just 22 showed up—“exactly enough for one offense, and one defense, with no subs.” The first varsity football practice landed on a borrowed vacant lot next to the Chico airport.
“The ‘field’ was a weed-choked lot filled with rocks and trash, food wrappers and soda cans, and giant holes next to piles of dirt. ‘Football’ was also a misnomer, as most of the kids were wearing old blue jeans and casual shoes. Even if they had gear, there was no place to dress.” The author adds, “The first workout since the fire was filled with a bunch of kids with:
• no sweats,
• no cleats,
• and no chance.”
Honest…when their first practice began—you guessed it:
• No football!
But…maybe hope could eke out. The San Francisco 49ers invited the team to their Nov. 12, 2018, Monday night game against the New York Giants. After a three-hour rickety bus ride to the game, those tired, disheveled young athletes emerged into the cold air (low 40s) with no coats. “They didn’t forget them; they simply didn’t have them anymore. Their winter clothes had burned up in the fire.” (No way! The Bobcats athletic director “swooped to the rescue” with a box of mismatched Paradise sweatshirts “pilfered from the student store earlier that morning.”)
Not the 49ers, but the Paradise football team was cheered by the 69,409 fans that night. Eli Manning’s team beat the 49ers in a heartbreaker, 27-23. “…but the Paradise Bobcats didn’t care. They knew loss, and this wasn’t it. This was relief. This was escape.”
Invited to appear on the postgame show, the players met “a tearful Jeff Garcia, a retired quarterback who’d been the franchise’s field general in the early 2000s.” He, like them, had experienced being “a tough kid in a small town.” So Garcia gently inspired them to rebuild and “…rally the troops and rally the town, right? Rally the town!”
Coach Prinz and the team wondered, “Rally the town? But didn’t they need a place to sleep first?” And suddenly…a bigger challenge emerged, perhaps a movement. “Rally the town!”
And so with prayer and persistence (did I mention prayer?), the former youth pastor now head football coach began strategizing both the plays and the process for the rebirth of Paradise.
At the Green and Gold intrasquad scrimmage (public invited), two weeks before the fall opener, “…a recording of singer-songwriter Phillip Phillips took over, the wistful sounds of his song, ‘Home,’ playing over the public address system.” Listen here.
One reviewer called this book, “Friday Night Lights meets Unbroken.” My summary: “If you appreciated The Boys in the Boat—and the stunning master class on teamwork—you won’t stop talking about Paradise Found.” Could this be my 2022 book-of-the-year? (Stay tuned.)
The leadership moments in virtually every short chapter are beacons of hope, such as the players’ commitment ceremony: “…the annual Prinz ritual in which each kid stands in front of the group and states his personal goal, team goal, and character goal for the coming season. They write down these goals on cards, which Prinz saves.”
But in 2019, there’s a twist: “When the players finished their commitments, the coaches took over the microphone. They’d also filled out cards. In past years, their part in the ceremony had been subdued. But this year was different. This year they turned the simple declarations into sermons.” A young assistant coach affirmed, “I’m proud to be part of this history that’s going to happen. This program is a huge part of rebuilding this community. I take it not as a burden but as an honor.” Whew!
Another coach wore sunglasses to hide his emotions. His words punctuated the moment: “I feel like God chose us.” Powerful!
I’ve read hundreds of Plaschke’s sports columns in the L.A. Times over the years and he never disappoints (read the tribute to his Mom). Ditto this book. Plaschke masterfully weaves the sobering survival stories of players, coaches, and cheerleaders into, over, and around the team’s 2019 season. (Spoiler alert: the Bobcats were a very good team!)
You must read this book—and when you do, watch for these gems:
• SLOGANS. The team slogans: “CMF: Crazy Mountain Folk” and my favorite, “We Just Hit People!”
• SKILLS. The athletic director’s persuasion skills in cajoling other football teams to compete against the Bobcats. (Lose/Lose: If other teams beat the up-from-the-ashes Bobcats, that’s not a good look. If other teams lose, it will look worse!)
• SPEECHES. The incredible, inspiring, and uplifting pre-game and halftime speeches by Coach Prinz and other coaches and the traditional “Glory Hill Run” with the motivational talk about Cortés and the 1519 conquest of Mexico. “And here the players shouted from the bottom of their ragged shoes to the top of their donated T-shirts: ‘Burn the ships!’”
• STADIUM. Returning (amazingly) to their own stadium for their first home game (on new grass!) with 5,000 ecstatic fans, yet…no restrooms (Porta-Potties only). And no full marching band (just half-the-size with three tubas, a lonely trumpet, the band instructor on the drums—and only 14 other instruments!)
• STILLNESS. The pregame team prayers (did I mention prayers?)
• SHE! Read how coach Prinz inspired and encouraged a trainer’s assistant to try out for the field goal kicker position. She (yes, she) earned the job—after following Coach Prinz’s contrarian counsel.
• SPIT. The “Paradise Medical Plan” vs. the Immediate Care Plan. Injured? Don’t go to Immediate Care—you’ll be out for two weeks. Instead see our trainer: “Us mountain boys, we put a little mud on it, a little spit on it, and we go back to work.”
• SCARS. Must-read: the 21 quotations, from John Milton’s Paradise Lost—appetizers for the meat to follow in every chapter including, “Purge off this gloom, the soft delicious air, to heal the scar of these corrosive fires.”
And the cheerleaders! Oh, my. “In some ways the Paradise cheerleaders faced greater challenges than the players did. They had to stifle their anger and stomach their personal losses while putting on smiles for a town that desperately needed smiles.” The senior cheerleading captain, while running for her life on Nov. 8, dashed back into her house to retrieve her cheer uniform.
At games, she led the cheers: “Circle up, P-Town, you know, you know; P-Town, the green and gold…” and the captain “shouted those words as if they were Scripture” and “clung to those words as if they were salvation.”Hope found? No way! Way!
Wow! I can’t imagine that any other book could so captivate my heart and mind for an entire day. I couldn’t put it down.Maybe Paradise Found touched those warm and raw emotions when I earned my varsity letter as #35 on Seattle’s Queen Anne High School football team (ACL injury and all). Or maybe…it was the sometimes rough “locker room” language? (Warning: the author quotes people verbatim, yet my Baptist values gave the crude vocabulary a pass. What angry words would I spew in similar circumstances?) But…maybe it was the praying. A plethora of prayers.
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Paradise Found: A High School Football Team’s Rise from the Ashes, by Bill Plaschke. Listen on Libro.fm (8 hours, 2 minutes).
P.S. BREAKING NEWS! Read more about this devasting fire in the article, “Inside the Investigation,” in the Aug. 27, 2022, edition of The Wall Street Journal. “The fire was entirely out of control. At its fastest, it engulfed the equivalent of 80 football fields a minute, by some estimates. As the evacuation process began, thick black smoke took on the hellish orange hue of the flames. Escape routes became choke points, lines of cars inching along melting asphalt.” (Excerpted from the new book, California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America’s Power Grid,” by Katherine Blunt.)
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) High school football coach Rick Prinz was the right person at the right time. A former youth pastor, he discovered his calling in coaching—and he embraced it. Frederick Buechner (1926-2022) wrote, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”How intentional are we in helping and inspiring our team members to embrace their callings?
2) CRISIS BUCKET EXERCISE!Oh, my. Most of your staff just lost their homes and their possessions in a horrific flood. Your entire office is underwater. You’ve assembled the team on high ground to assess, plan, and bring comfort. With no time to prepare (no way), you pull out your best motivational pep talk. Will it be adequate? Will it be enough? (It’s a little late to learn character in a crisis.) Are you ready?
From the YouTube interview with Bill Plaschke: “That’s crazy! How you gonna have a football team with no town?” Watch the entertaining interview with Bill Plaschke on the story behind the story of Paradise Found. (Click here for the 51-minute interview.)
Bill Plaschke chats about writing Paradise Found
What he learned from Coach Rick Prinz, his favorite column ever, Kobe and Shaq, the craft of writing, and his biggest fan—his mother!
Fascinating! On Nov. 17, 2021, just after Paradise Found was published, Bill Plaschke was interviewed by Christian Stone, L.A. Times executive sports editor.
In addition to his color commentary on this unique writing project, Plaschke talks about his amazing 33 years with the L.A. Times, including 25 years as a columnist. (It’s a master class for writers and communicators.) And get this: already an experienced sports writer when he joined the L.A. Times team, the editors rewrote his story leads for Plaschke’s first eight articles!
Listen to “Ask a Reporter” with columnist Bill Plaschke (51 minutes on YouTube). Click here.
Get Ready for Your Next Crisis! Read Connectable: How Leaders Can Move Teams From Isolated to All In, by Ryan Jenkins and Steven Van Cohen. Why? Patrick Lencioni urges, “Every leader and manager needs to read this.” Read John’s review on the Pails in Comparison blog.
JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Prepared for your next crisis? You’ll need more than a clever slogan. Is your communication contingency plan in place to bring hope to your team and your constituency? We can help! contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
