235 pages
11 × 8 ½
Softcover
ISBN 1-882203-860
Copyright 2002
By Bill Koch
In the dawn of Queen City athletic time, what would become all over Ohio as ‘The Pit’ was exactly that—a dusty cow pasture on Cincinnati’s West Side adorned with a manhole on the 50-yard line. It was the only known playing field in Ohio where a manhole was the home field advantage, and its sewer-lid icon became a kind of trademark for the school’s rough-and-ready working class play.
This all-boys parochial school, nestled in a residential corner of blue-collar Price Hill, acquired a following of loyalists found in no other school in Cincinnati, maybe in no other school anywhere.
The intensity that grew up around it was such that after one close loss, the student manager broke down and wept. It was the mystique that led 25,000 Elder fans into Paul Brown Stadium on the riverfront—for a high school game.
A curiosity to outsiders, the lifelong object of affection and fealty to insiders, this is the mystique that created back-to-back basketball state titles, a cross country dynasty, an unprecedented eleven baseball championships, and a football team with a national ranking. Its football field was named by USA Today as one of the best places in America to watch high school football, and its graduates have populated programs from Division I all the way to the professional ranks.
235 pages
11 × 8 ½
Softcover
ISBN 1-882203-860
Copyright 2002
By Bill Koch
In the dawn of Queen City athletic time, what would become all over Ohio as ‘The Pit’ was exactly that—a dusty cow pasture on Cincinnati’s West Side adorned with a manhole on the 50-yard line. It was the only known playing field in Ohio where a manhole was the home field advantage, and its sewer-lid icon became a kind of trademark for the school’s rough-and-ready working class play.
This all-boys parochial school, nestled in a residential corner of blue-collar Price Hill, acquired a following of loyalists found in no other school in Cincinnati, maybe in no other school anywhere.
The intensity that grew up around it was such that after one close loss, the student manager broke down and wept. It was the mystique that led 25,000 Elder fans into Paul Brown Stadium on the riverfront—for a high school game.
A curiosity to outsiders, the lifelong object of affection and fealty to insiders, this is the mystique that created back-to-back basketball state titles, a cross country dynasty, an unprecedented eleven baseball championships, and a football team with a national ranking. Its football field was named by USA Today as one of the best places in America to watch high school football, and its graduates have populated programs from Division I all the way to the professional ranks.
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