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Analysis Of Friday Night Lights By Jay Coakley

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What can be described as “A subdiscipline of sociology and physical education that studies sports as social phenomena,” sociology of sport can be applied to most any sport today (Coakley, 2015, pg. 9), especially football. Football is a perfect example to showcase most of the concepts within the field of sport sociology. These concepts are greatly detailed in Jay Coakley’s textbook, Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies (2015) and provides a solid base to understanding them. Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger (1990) provides the perfect football story to outline Coakley’s concepts, especially since it is a recollection of what happened in real-life to the 1988 Permian Panther football team from Odessa, TX. Friday Night Lights is mentioned within Coakley’s textbook (Coakley, 2015; pgs. 470-471) and even Bissinger himself asked important sociological questions that lie within Coakley’s textbook (Bissinger, 2015; pg. xiii). General implications, school spirit, race, social class, politics, and …show more content…

This can be contributed to the “selection-in process” that Coakley (2015) describes on page 466 of his book. These students choose to participate, excel at tryouts, and are selected to be part of the team. In Friday Night Lights (2015), the entire town of Odessa knows and expects this from the football team and gives them status in town because of it. Being part of the cheerleading squad, the Pepettes, was a revered position as well (pg. 150). Mike Winchell, the Permian quarterback indicated it “…gave him a certain status, because just about everybody in town knew who the quarterback was… (pg. 8)” and Don Billingsley felt that as a player, it gave him special status among his peers, “regardless of how he performed in class (pg. 147).” Even a classmate noted that the football players had a “glorious identity (pg.

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