'This is not a normal night in Collierville,' and high school football can't fix that | Giannotto

Wright Cox read the prayer off a sheet of paper so he wouldn’t forget what he wanted to say. 

So he would capture the appropriate mood ahead of the first Collierville High School football game, and the largest gathering of people in Collierville, since the most horrific event in town history.

So he wouldn’t start thinking about his brother, a firefighter who was among the initial first responders, and break down in tears again. 

“We pray for all the normal things that come with a normal night of high school football, but this is not a normal night in Collierville,” the chairman of Collierville’s Board of Education said after asking the crowd to hold hands or lock arms for a moment of silence. “Yesterday’s tragedy in our community changed all that.”

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The Collierville football team then came running out from its inflatable, smoke-filled dragon, waving 15 American flags, one for each of the victims in Thursday’s deadly shooting at the Collierville Kroger. There was a new motto and hashtag (#ColliervilleStrong) displayed on posters throughout the stadium, and a local business had already started printing T-shirts, with half the proceeds donated to the victims’ families. 

The National Anthem was played with the flags at half-mast, and then a high school football game took place. Collierville beat Whitehaven 28-6 to improve to 6-0, and the experience provided an odd blend of comfort and concern. 

Comfort from seeing and feeling Collierville’s resiliency in action, but concern that there is now a template for how to respond to the sort of evil inflicted by Uk Thang, the 29-year-old alleged gunman. 

There have been 518 incidents this year classified as mass shootings in the United States as of Friday, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit organization that tracks gun violence. Collierville became one of 18 American cities or towns in the past week to join this awful list. 

Just pause to think about that for a moment.

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Our preconceived notions of where it’s safe and where it’s not have been shattered because just about anyone can get their hands on a gun in this country.

But let’s leave the debate over Tennessee’s far-too-lenient gun control laws to the side for the sake of discussing what Friday night meant for Collierville. Even if it only seems sensible that if you can’t drive a car without a license, you shouldn’t be able to carry a gun without one, either.

Let’s instead lament the loss of innocence from trauma like this, a loss that manifested itself at a high school football game in a part of the Memphis area unaccustomed to this. Because throughout the crowd, there were different versions of the same conversation and they all inevitably included the same sentiment: “You just don’t think it’s going to happen here.” 

Sue Frost was saying those exact words when her granddaughter began talking about what it was like to be locked down in her Collierville Elementary School classroom. Frost raised her own daughter in Collierville, and now that daughter is doing the same, and the helpless feeling in light of Thursday’s events left her pondering a question with no obvious answer.

“What can you do?” Frost asked, and then she mentioned she had a friend who knew Olivia King, the woman killed simply because she decided to go grocery shopping at the wrong time. 

It’s heartbreaking that in a tight-knit place like Collierville, everyone is connected to these victims in some fashion. It’s heartbreaking that a generation of parents and children in Collierville will remember how it felt to be terrified. It’s heartbreaking that on the other side of the field, Whitehaven knew this pain, too. 

Just last September one of its players was killed due to gun violence. It’s why Whitehaven coach Rodney Saulsberry called his Collierville counterpart, Joe Rocconi, Thursday night to make sure everyone was OK and offer a piece of advice. 

“The game can be used as therapy and we have to use it as therapy,” Saulsberry said. “It can let these kids know that life goes on.” 

“If we can help our town forget about this just for three hours,” Rocconi added, “it’s a good thing.”

Yet this is both a soothing and scary lesson to consider.

A high school football game shouldn’t carry such meaning. But on Friday night, it did. 

On Friday night, it brought a community back together after perhaps the most violent act in its history. On Friday night, kids played pick-up football behind the bleachers, and parents worked the concession stands, and the student section stormed onto the field to celebrate when Collierville won. 

On Friday night, once the pregame prayer was over, it almost felt normal again.

You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter: @mgiannotto