"Friday Night Lights" inhabit Philadelphia's Frankford High

Popular TV series comes to Philly and Frankford is bright-light beneficiary.

Thumbnail image of this articles writer: Joseph Santoliquito
By
Jul 24, 2010, 9:16am
It’s very rare — if not at all — that Philadelphia Public League football teams, or “The Pub,” as it’s known in Philly, get to enjoy playing under the glare of the Friday night lights. Most Philadelphia Public League schools don’t have lights at their facilities, using four “super complexes” on a rotating basis for those exceptional times when teams can play before large crowds on Friday nights.

Consequently, most Pub games are played on Friday afternoons. Small crowds. No lights.

But in late-July, Philly’s Frankford High School got a little taste of what playing on Friday nights is all about — Hollywood style.

Pioneers’ coach Mike Capriotti, his coaching staff and 32 of his players received a juicy experience as the fictitious Pemberton Pioneers for a filming of "Friday Night Lights." We can’t go any further than that, because it would give away the plot twist of the popular high school football television series.

But we can say that it was an unforgettable day for a coach, his players, and those in the surrounding Frankford section of Philadelphia who showed up to watch the filming at Franklin Memorial Stadium, one of the classic high school football venues in Pennsylvania.

Capriotti and Frankford athletic director Jack Creighton first became aware of this back in June, when they noticed someone with a camera taking pictures of the Memorial Stadium complex. Here, it was someone from Friday Night Lights scouting five Philadelphia-area schools for possible filming locations. Capriotti gave them the 10-cent tour and the rich background of Memorial Stadium — where he played in the 1960s, and where his father played back in the 1940s.

That was it. The Friday Night Lights people were sold.

Before Capriotti and Creighton knew it, Frankford’s red, blue and gold colors were stenciled over and transformed into the green and white of fictitious Pemberton.

“The guys from the show wanted an older field and feel for an older school for the shoot,” Capriotti aid. “The kids loved it. It was a great experience. It was just like a practice. The kids took to it really well. It was a great experience for the team, and it was something really good for Philadelphia Public League football.”

It will look polished and smooth once aired, which is scheduled for some time in May 2011. But the players and coaches did get an inside glimpse of the hard work that goes behind a TV production. The players were told to arrive at 2:30 p.m. and large portable lights on huge cranes were brought in for the night sessions. They didn’t wrap up filming until around 11.

Four scenes were shot, each scene filmed about 15 times each. Frankford wide receiver Savoy Martin and quarterback Mike McGroarty received a lot of camera time, since they were doing passing drills. It just took a little time to get used to the big eye of the camera poised on them.

“It was like a practice, doing the same stuff over and over again,” Martin said. “I felt the camera on me, because it was so close. But I just did what I normally do at practice, and they kept telling us to come back and do it again and again. Just like a practice.”

Martin did find it authentic, however, because Kyle Chandler, the actor who plays coach Eric Taylor of the fictional East Dillon High Lions on Friday Night Lights, let them have it in his Southern drawl the times they made mistakes.

Coach Capriotti is as old school as they come. He doesn’t use profanity when he scolds his players, instead using colorful colloquial phrases like “You’re full of soup” and “My grandmother hits harder than that and she’s been dead for 30 years.”

It just made Capriotti grin and do a double-take when those axioms—his expressions—came spilling out of Chandler, who hit up Capriotti's brother-in-law, Ed Doyle, and nephew, Dominick Doyle, Frankford assistant coaches, for things Coach Capriotti would say during practice.

“He had Coach Cap’s sayings down pat, and he was yelling at us like a coach would,” Martin said. “It was a lot of fun though, but it was different wearing those colors and not our colors. We all know what it’s like being on TV now.”

Brandon Russell, Frankford’s 5-foot-11, 240-pound senior two-way lineman, played a key role, too. He was the center.

“I’m an o-lineman, but I only played center once and here I am with TV cameras there on me; yes, I was a little nervous at first playing center,” Russell said, laughing. “Some of those bad snaps, they came from me. I just had to get used to [the actor Chandler] telling us what to do, but I couldn’t help myself from always looking at Coach Cap, who was an assistant coach standing behind him.

“The whole thing was great though. It was like being welcomed into Hollywood. They gave us breaks, and they had something set up for lunch taking us by minivan, where we sat at tables and ate. It was fantastic. They really took care of us. Camp begins in about three weeks. You think we’re going to be taken by minivan to a catered lunch then?”

No, they’re going to be drinking Gatorade and eating lunch out of brown bags on the field like every other high school football player during camp. But it was nice to be treated that way for a day.

As a Frankford varsity player, Russell never experienced a Friday night game. Frankford last played on Friday night two years ago — but the Pioneers do have two Friday nights scheduled this season visiting suburban schools Hatboro-Horsham and Pennsbury.

Because Frankford High volunteered its players, coaches and facilities to the show, the Frankford football program will receive extra equipment — and the players will have an idea of what’s ahead when they actually do play on Friday nights this coming season.

“I haven’t experienced that yet here, so that’s the one thing that’s ironic about this,” Russell said. “We’re going to be on Friday Night Lights and we don’t play [that often] on Friday nights.”

Within a day, the Pemberton Pioneers disappeared. The green stencil was peeled off the scoreboard. The green helmets, borrowed from suburban powerhouse Ridley were returned with the “R” back in place, and Frankford was Frankford again without leaving a trace that anything was filmed there on July 20th.

But it did provide a group of players a sense of what it’s like playing football in front of a TV camera. And what playing on Friday nights are about.

“It is rare we do play on Friday nights, that is special for a football player in the Pub,” Capriotti said. “The filming of the show really did give something special to these kids. They got to see and feel what it is like playing on a Friday night.”

Even if it was a Tuesday in July.

Joseph Santoliquito covers high schools for the Philadelphia Daily News and is a contributor to MaxPreps.com. He can be contacted at JSantoliquito@yahoo.com.

Related Content