Vince Lombardi almost did not play high school football.

When he graduated from eighth grade in a public school in Brooklyn, he decided to attend a Catholic seminary and study to be a priest.

"The choice he made, Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, a diocesan preparatory seminary, reflected not only what he wanted to study but also whom he hoped to become," wrote David Maraniss in "When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi."

"He thought he was on his way to being Father Lombardi," Maraniss wrote. "Pursuing the priesthood was not an unusual calling for a studious Catholic boy then, not for an altar boy so earnest that he appeared at church an hour before mass, but it was out of the ordinary within his family."

At Cathedral, Lombardi played basketball and baseball. But the school did not have a football team.

In 1932, after he finished his fourth year in this seminary — which ran a six-year program — he transferred to another Catholic School, St. Francis Preparatory School in Brooklyn. It did have a football team, and he played for it — even though it did not have a football field on campus.

"Back in Brooklyn, they put on their pads and cleats on at school, then clambered into an old bus and jostled through the borough to what passed for a field on the edge of Todd's Shipyard along the East River waterfront," wrote Maraniss. "The skyscrapers of Manhattan soared in the middle distance."

"But if the conditions were difficult, the football was the real thing," he wrote.

Lombardi then won a scholarship to play football at Fordham, the Jesuit university in the Bronx. His head coach there was Jim Crowley, who had been one of the "Four Horsemen of Notre Dame." The line coach was Frank Leahy, a fellow Notre Dame alumnus, who would go on to become Notre Dame's head coach.

Lombardi became part of a Fordham line that was known as the "Seven Blocks of Granite."

"Meet Fordham's 'seven blocks of granite,' a 1351-pound forward wall of bone and muscle rated by enemy linemen as the nearest approach to an immovable object in the topsy-turvy lore of college football,'" said an Associated Press story published during the 1936 season.

"Vincent Lombardi: The right guard, is Fordham's work horse — steady and deadly effective on close-up play," said this story.

Two years after graduating from Fordham, and after spending just one semester in law school, Lombardi took a job in 1939 as an assistant football coach at St. Cecilia Catholic High School in Englewood, New Jersey. Two years after that, he became the head coach of the St. Cecilia Saints. He also taught "physics, chemistry and Latin."

"Year by year, as his reputation grew beyond Englewood, it became clear to him that coaching was his life's calling," wrote Maraniss. "Lombardi ended up staying at Saints for eight years."

At St. Cecilia, Lombardi brought his team to mass before each game.

"After the players put on their pads and uniforms, Coach Lombardi led them out from the dank basement locker room and directed them down the slope to church, their cleats clickety-clack-clicking on the sidewalk and up the marble steps as they entered the sanctuary to attend mass and receive communion," wrote Maraniss.

"Before the opening kickoff," he wrote, "Lombardi gathered his charges at the sidelines to recite the Lord's Prayer."

Eventually, this great high school football coach would end up coaching the Green Bay Packers — where he would win three NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls.

In August 1968, after winning Super Bowl II in January of that year, Lombardi addressed the Football Writers Association of America. He spoke there about the virtues of the game he loved.

"The game encourages courage over timidity," Lombardi said, as reported by sports columnist John O'Donnell. "It is a game which admits no social barriers, and every player knows that it requires concerted action, team work, rather than an individual effort.

"Football is like life," Lombardi said. "It means work, sacrifice, drive and respect for authority. You can't fake and get by, and you have to be prepared, physically and mentally.

"That is what our country has to have right now, not 50 years from now," Lombardi said. "We have to be prepared for the test or we might not win the big one."

More than a million high school boys in the United States competed on 11-player football teams in the 2025-2026 season, according to the National Federation of State High School Association's annual report on high school sports participation.

In fact, a record number of American high school students played sports last year.

"The annual NFHS High School Athletics Participation Survey indicated that 8,415,684 participants were involved in high school sports in 2025-26 — up 149,440 from the previous year," said the NFHS. "The total includes 4,761,095 boys and 3,654,589 girls — both record highs — according to figures obtained from the 51 NFHS member state associations, which includes the District of Columbia."

In the last school year, according to the survey, 1,043,716 boys competed on 11-player football teams. That was more than the 648,723 boys who competed in outdoor track and field; the 539,883 boys who competed in basketball; the 509,070 girls who competed in outdoor track and field; and the 502,056 girls who competed in volleyball.

In the 2022-23 school year, 1,028,761 high school boys competed in 11-player football. In the 2023-24 school year, it was 1,031,508. In the 2024-25 school year, as this column has noted before, it was 1,029,588.

The more than a million high school boys who play football each year are learning good lessons for life.

To find out more about Terence P. Jeffrey and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Raymond Petrik at Unsplash