COLUMN ONE : A Revival of Six-Man Football : The field is shorter and the scores are often higher. As populations dwindle, rural towns are turning to the Depression-era game in a bid to keep high school teams of their own.

It’s the season when the corn is all in and breath starts to hang in the crisp night air like a wobbly “Hail Mary” pass, and the focus of life and spirit in thousands of tiny towns like this one shifts to the high school gridiron.

Here in Chester, where the population sign brags 400 but some people swear that includes all the animals, school got out early for the homecoming celebrations on a recent football Friday. There was a pep rally in the gym where just about every one of the 41 boys and girls in high school as well as dozens of little brothers and sisters, moms, dads and just plain civic boosters gathered to spur their local heroes on to greater glory.

Later, over at the home side of the field out along U.S. 81, the run on popcorn had started at the concession stand and the bleachers were packed long before the school band struck up the national anthem in an off-key oompah that could have made Roseanne Barr Arnold cringe. The overflow spread up and down the sidelines despite a biting wind and reservoirs of mud and puddles left from an icy, on and off shower.

The coin was tossed, the introductions made and finally, as the last rays of sunlight disappeared across the plains, the mighty starting six of the Chester-Hubbell-Byron Consolidated High School Bulldogs squared off against the starting six of the hated visiting Campbell Cardinals.

That’s right. Starting six.

The Friday night high school football game is a cherished ritual in rural America. But many communities such as Chester, smack dab on the Kansas border and 175 miles by car from Omaha, have shrivelled so much in size in recent years that their schools can no longer scrape together enough boys to maintain a competitive 11-man team.

The solution: six-man football, a Depression-era gridiron variant now experiencing a resurgence as the population of the nation’s heartland continues to dwindle. The field is shorter, the game faster, the rules altered, the scores often higher and the team rosters surely more egalitarian than anything in traditional football.

“Everybody gets to play,” explained Rex Jones, who oversees interscholastic high school football programs in Nebraska. “I went to a six-man game a few years ago and there was some kid out there so little his jersey wasn’t missing the ground by much.”

Chester’s squad, for example, ranges from 6-foot-1, 264-pound sophomore center Travis Stradley to fellow sophomore running back Jon Berry, 5 foot even and 100 pounds sopping wet, who admits that the thought of getting squashed like a turnip does cross his mind. When a really big guy comes after him, he says, “I’ll try to run away from them to the sidelines.”

But the big difference with six-man football is not the size of the backfield but the dimensions of the void it has to fill in communities with no libraries, no theaters, no drive-ins, no groceries, no dance halls, no shops, no mall. It could even be 25, 40 miles or more to the nearest video store or Wal-Mart.

“It’s the only thing in town,” said Roger Hill, principal and athletic director at Chester High. “I don’t know if our boys realize how much the community appreciates having them play.”

Once, back in the era before towns began merging schools to save money, the game was played at a few thousand country schools across the broad, sparsely populated expanses of the Great Plains and Midwest. At its peak in the early 1950s, more than 180 high schools in Nebraska--virtually half of all those in the state at the time--were playing six-man football. Old-timers still talk of six-man bowl games that drew upwards of 2,000 spectators.

As baby boomers started swelling enrollment even in out-of-the-way places, many schools finally found themselves with a big enough pool of bodies to move up to either 11-man competition or at least another offshoot that uses eight men on a side but is otherwise identical to the traditional game. By the mid-1960s, Chester had an enrollment of 76 and was competing in an 11-man league. The quirky, wide-open six-man sport had totally died out in Nebraska by the 1960s and came close to extinction elsewhere.

Then economic and demographic realities, accelerated by the ravaging and disillusioning effects of the farm crisis, led to a serious depopulation of many rural regions and a precipitous decline in enrollments--even after many schools such as Chester had consolidated with neighboring districts. For a growing number of small schools these days, when it comes to football its six-man or nothing.

Six-man started reappearing in Nebraska about a decade ago. This year, 31 high schools in the state are competing in six-man football leagues. Nearly 100 of the 1,100 high schools in Texas are playing six-man rather than 11-man this season. It is also played in Colorado, Montana and New Mexico.

In Nebraska, many more are contemplating the switch. Dennis Paul, assistant football coach at the high school in Cedar Rapids, Neb., 110 miles west of Omaha, said his team plays in an eight-man league currently but will go to six-man next year because only 10 of the 16 members of the team are big enough to play safely. None of the rest weighs in at more than 120 pounds.

“The parents want to see their kids having some success,” Paul said. “We’re putting sophomores out there against seniors and it’s dangerous.”

What Cooperstown, N.Y., is to baseball and Canton, Ohio, is to regular football, Chester is to the six-man version of the game. The credit goes to Stephen E. Epler, the Chester coach back in the 1933-34 school year when he designed the game for a graduate studies project at the University of Nebraska. A few years later, he also devised a blueprint for six-man baseball. Apparently, some things were just too sacred and it never caught on.

Epler, who now lives in retirement in Sacramento, said his goal was to devise something to keep students in small schools from feeling like they were missing out. At the time, Chester and many other schools of its size did not compete in football because they could not field a squad of eleven.

“The six-man game gave the high school students something to do and they could stay at their own schools and they could have all the bands and the pep rallies just like the big schools,” said Epler, now 82, who was returned to Chester to be honored at special ceremonies during halftime of the Campbell game.

Enrollments were so small back then that players had to be drafted from four area high schools to make up the two teams that played each other on Sept. 26, 1934, in the first ever six-man game. For the record, the combined squad from Chester and Hardy high schools struggled to a 19-19 tie with the boys representing both Alexandria and Belvidere highs.

Unlike regular football, six-man is played on a field that is 80 instead of 100 yards long. The ball has to advance 15 yards to get a first down instead of 10. Field goals net four points instead of three and extra point scoring is the opposite of the way it is in most high school games--two points for a kick and one for a pass or run.

On offense, most formations utilize a front line of only three players, not six or seven, and any player on the field--even a lineman--is eligible to receive a pass. The edge usually goes to the offense, because there are so few people on the field that it is much easier to break free for long yardage. To counteract that edge, every play has to begin with a short pitch or pass behind the line of scrimmage--effectively slowing the offense down a bit. Even so, it is not uncommon for a good team to score 60 or 70 points in a game. The rule book includes a slaughter rule that ends the game if any side gets 45 points ahead, which often happens.

It may be a slimmed down version of the real thing, but many of those who play and watch six-man football swear by it. “It’s more exciting,” claims senior Alan Poppe, the Chester quarterback. “There’s a lot better chance to score on every play. It’s really an open game.”

Down in Texas, where the passion for high school football borders on hysteria, things really get “wild and woolly,” said Jack Shely, secretary of the Texas Six-man Coaches Assn. And he’s not just talking about the rattlesnakes that have on occasion slithered on fields and forced games to a halt.

Once, when Shely coached at Silverton in the Texas Panhandle, the team was taking a 125-mile bus ride to an away game. Hometown boosters drove ahead of the bus and staged a mini-pep rally every five miles along the entire route. “We got in the playoffs the first year I was there and I could have been elected mayor,” Shely declared.

For many declining towns, the revival of six-man football goes hand in hand with desperate efforts to avoid consolidation and keep local schools running at all costs.

With so little to do and so little to keep young people from moving away once they come of age, school-related activities are the heart and soul of social life and spirit in most rural communities. “Once your school’s gone, the town kind of loses its identity,” said James Vorderstrasse, a Chester area farmer. “We’re going to fight to keep everything going as long as we can.” Vorderstrasse was on the sidelines the other night to cheer the Bulldogs on even though he didn’t have a youngster on the team.

Economic self-interest also has something to do with it. Shutting down the local school and busing the kids to the next town or two over often kills off the major source of non-farm employment in places that offer little else more than perhaps a grain elevator, a bar, coffee shop or gas station.

In Venango, a town of 192 in the remote stretches of western Nebraska, the bank closed not long ago, the farmer’s co-op laid off workers in a shake-up, and now people are talking about finally being forced to give up on the 13-pupil high school after this year. Such a move would eliminate 25% of the jobs in town, said Principal John Broadbent. “It’s kind of imploding on itself,” he said of the town. “When it’s this small, everything you lose is major.”

Nevertheless, the school board voted against merging the football squad with that of another school even though the Panthers, as the Venango squad is known, had not won a game in two years and could not scrape up more than eight boys to play this fall.

The Panthers’ losing streak finally ended thanks to a forfeit in late September. On the morning of the game, the coach from Cody-Kilgore High School called to say his team would not be making the 200-mile drive south to Venango. Two of his seven players had failed a test and were not eligible, leaving his squad a man shy.

Some six-man schools are so small that the coaches and student managers have to practice with the regular players so they can have enough people to scrimmage. A single injury can devastate a team.

Chester is not quite in that shape yet, but it is close. Fifteen of the 18 boys in grades 9 through 12 are members of the team. Two of the remaining three are student managers. For the girls, the cheerleading squad was disbanded this season because everybody was too busy being in the marching band or running the concession stand.

While the variety of extracurricular activities available is not huge, the rates of student participation would be the envy of any big city high school. The band, for instance, includes 35 students, though it has to make do with far fewer during football games because so many of the regular musicians are on the team.

Poppe, the quarterback, is also on the basketball and track teams and plays trombone in the band. The morning after the Campbell game, he caught an early bus with the other band members who then made a 250-mile round trip to participate in a parade. “About everybody’s out for everything,” he explained.

How about that Campbell game, anyway? It started out with a bang for Chester when junior Thad Mumm, grandson of Garald Van Winkle, who played in Epler’s groundbreaking six-man game, ran the opening kickoff back 78 yards for a touchdown. In the fourth quarter, he ran back another kickoff for 75 yards.

Unfortunately, Campbell did most of the scoring in between those two noble efforts and the score was knotted at an unusually modest 20-20 at the close of regulation play. Then Campbell won it in overtime, 26-20. But at least little Jon Berry lived to play another game.