Book Review: Hurricane Season
The True Story of a Football Team and Hurricane Katrina
Coach JT Curtis is the second winningest coach in high school football, but his most inspiring story is found in a book about football, Hurricane Katrina, and hope.
Hurricane Season: A Coach, His Team, and Their Triumph in the Time of Katrina, written by veteran journalist Neal Thompson, is the true story of a racially diverse private school whose football team inspired the New Orleans area community in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Readers may wonder why a book on post-Katrina New Orleans would focus on football. Anyone familiar with Louisiana culture need not ask such a question. Louisianans love football, and football fans in the New Orleans area know John Curtis Christian School.
John Curtis Christian School
John Curtis Christian School is a family-run Christian school renowned for its powerhouse football team led by Coach J.T. Curtis, son of the school's namesake founder, John Curtis. It is also respected for its academics and its racial diversity. John Curtis Christian School boasts a minority population of around 20 percent -- an impressive number in an "otherwise de facto segregated system," writes Thompson.
Unlike many private schools, John Curtis isn't focused on making money. Writes Thompson: "For parents struggling to pay tuition, Mr. Curtis often made special arrangements, allowing them to pay by driving a school bus or working in the cafeteria." That kind of generosity - and the fact that the school continues in family hands - has insured that John Curtis Christian School remains (in Thompson's words) "an attractive alternative to the costlier private schools."
Coach JT Curtis and Winning
Those individuals averse to intense sports competition and uncomfortable with high-performance gung-ho,football coaching will probably not like JT Curtis. That's okay, because Coach JT Curtis probably doesn't slow down enough to care about critics. But he does care about his players, about football, and about winning.
Thompson's book paints a picture of a coach that is part-father and part-counselor to his players as well as their coach. He clearly loves his players, but is not afraid to push them hard - very hard. He is relentless on the fundamentals and on the details, and is regarded as one of the most demanding coaches in high school football. The result? He's one of the most winning coaches in high school football. Not just in Louisiana, but nationwide.
There's also a fair amount of animosity toward Coach Curtis and his small Christian school - from other Louisiana schools. "In a city and state so obsessed with football," writes Thompson. "The winning record of a teeny little John Curtis school has generated an enormous amount of resentment."
Hurricane Katrina and a Community's Pride
Everyone knows that Hurricane Katrina absolutely devastated southern Louisiana and Mississippi, but not everyone really felt that destruction. The families and players of John Curtis Christian School did.
For Coach JT Curtis, all of his lessons on character, teamwork, and leadership came to a head with Katrina. No longer was Coach Curtis training his kids for the future, using football as an object lesson for life. With Katrina, Curtis' players had to put those lessons to work right away. His team of teenage boys had to become men.
As Thompson writes toward the end of Hurricane Season: "J.T.'s years of turning scared and skinny little boys into finely honed football warriors have taught him to believe in the steady progress of perserverance, and....each day is a baby step to recovery."
Hurricane Season tells a great story -- made all the more great, because it's true.
