Friday Football Fanatics

You know who they are. Or maybe you don't.

From Apachhe Junction to Phoenix St. Mary's, Scottsdale Notre Dame to Chandler Basha, they're in the bleachers on Friday nights, home or away, monsoon or shine.

Hundreds of players, several coaches and a handful of U.S. presidents pass through, but the high school die-hards remain. Passion and loyalty are the only prerequisites.

Some must have the same seat at every game wearing a school shirt or hat. Others don face paint, sans shirts, and squeeze themselves into a mob with a hundred of their brethren.

Some love the spotlight. Others loathe it.

Each one has a story to tell, so this is but a sliver of the East Valley's Friday football fanatics.

ZOO CREW 
- Mountain Pointe

When Brandon Buck became Phoenix Mountain Pointe's baseball coach in 2006, he reached back to his southern Indiana roots, where the gyms' attendance proved that basketball rules.

Buck made a concerted effort to make sure his baseball players were part of the (sideline) action.

Former baseball players Josh and Jordan Reed took the cue and ran with it. Since they had friends on the football team, they decided to take the ambience up a notch by creating a weekly theme.

The "Zoo Crew," originally a group of 15, was born.

They would throw out ideas each Monday at lunch, and then make an announcement during each of the two lunch periods.

These days, the group has grown tenfold and does its thematic announcements during a weekly in-school TV announcement.

Among the favorites: 

- Ugly Sweater Night 

- Mime Night, which involved a lot of white face makeup, fake cheering and "silent" clapping. It lasted one quarter.
"It was pretty ridiculous-looking watching it from across the field," said Josh Reed, a 2006 graduate who plays baseball at the University of Utah. 

- Ian Moses Night, an homage to the school's assistant principal/athletic director. Kids wore a shirt and tie to the game, and wore skull masks or white swim caps to make them look bald. 

- Little League Night, which brought back the 10- and 11-yearold "All-Star" Little League jerseys they wore as youth, out of storage closets.

"I'm pretty fortunate with the groups I have," Buck said. "They'll push the envelope a little as you'd expect, but they wouldn't do anything too stupid. Kids seem to enjoy it and bond a little more. Plus, other teachers with kids in elementary schools are starting to dress up."

Parents' closets and Goodwill help keep any clothing or supply expenditures to a minimum, and when it's Mountain Pointe vs. Desert Vista in the Ahwatukee Bowl, both sides take it up a notch, sometimes sharing theme ideas to make sure there's no overlap.

Home or away, the bleachers are a zoo filled with Pride.

"Through the years, new members keep coming through," Reed said. "It's good people are excited to support their community and friends."

DON KLINDER

- Brophy
After 38 years of attending his alma mater's football games and practices, Don Klinder didn' t want any attention. He doesn't really want this tale about him written.

Phoenix Brophy thought otherwise. After the Broncos won last year's 5A Division I state championship for the second time in three years, the school gave Klinder a letter jacket.

"I never thought of it as much," he said. "It was me enjoying myself a lot, and they seem to have taken notice and they asked me at a winter football banquet to be a guest. I didn't know it was coming."

It was a lot nicer than the $35 varsity sweater he received as the football team's manager in 1958, and true to form, Klinder spoke of returning the jacket to the school so a kid who m ay not have been able to afford one has a chance.

A 1959 Broncos graduate, Klinder has developed a self-proclaimed "football fetish" and has followed his alma mater since returning to Phoenix in 1970. After serving in the military, he landed back in Phoenix, found a job with Rainbow Baking Company (now Sara Lee) and a place to live near the school. He then took a security job in 1998 and retired following an aortic aneurysm in 2006.
Most days, he's at Brophy football practice watching but rarely conversing. He's not there to tell coaches or players what to do.
Mostly, he's there to take in the sights and sounds, and get as close to his boyhood dream as possible.

"I wish I could have played and would have tried football but didn't feel I weighed enough to play at 125 pounds," he said. "I thought I'd get killed. I know I would now."

GEORGE KITAMURA AND BUDDY SEXTON

- Chandler

A loyalty quandary is coming.

For now, there's no problem. George and Beryl Kitamura can spend Thursday night watching their grandson, Jimmy, a sophomore, play for Chandler Hamilton's junior varsity team.

On Fridays, George, 69, can be found in the Chandler High stands with longtime friend Buddy Sexton, watching the Wolves as they've done every week since the mid-1970s when this pair of former military men met in the bleachers of football games, each with at least one child on the field.

See the future conundrum?

"We may have to split and send my wife (Beryl) to one game and I'll go to the others," George said. "I don't know how this is going to work."

The Wolves allegiance isn't going to waver. After being raised in Hawaii, Kitamura spent 17 years with the Air Force, living in England (where he met Beryl nearly 50 years ago), France, Germany and Africa.

He wound up at Williams Air Force Base for four more years in the mid-1970s, and enrolled their first child, Sheryl, at Chandler. He retired from the military at age 38 but finished his bachelor's degree anyway at ASU two years later.

Sheryl earned an academic scholarship to ASU and is now the director of bands at Chandler, so they stayed.

Then came their younger son, Jeremy, who played football and baseball for the Wolves in the mid-1980s, went to ASU and now lives south in Hamilton country (which is why Jimmy is a Husky).

George coached future ASU and NFL player Adam Archuleta in Pop Warner and is a self-proclaimed sports junkie, but high school football takes the cake. He follows his team to Glendale or Tucson, and when the Wolves played at Yuma two years ago, he and Beryl stayed overnight.

Not a bad way to live the last 32 years. Or live out the next 20 or so.

"The thing I like about high school (football) is they're so unpredictable," he said. "You don't know what they're going to do. They're high school kids and that makes it impossible to figure out what happens from one play to the next."