Durham Jordan teacher/coach publishes book on high School football, education In N.C.

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DURHAM - A teacher-coach at a North Carolina High School Athletic Association member school has written a book about high school football that should be of interest to many readers of the NCHSAA Bulletin.

Every Friday night in autumn, stadium lights illuminate the farmlands and urban cityscapes of America with a glimmer of hope. In the new book "Sidelines", award-winning Durham Jordan teacher Stuart Albright provides an entirely new take on the role of sports in American life.

"Sidelines" is an insider's look at the fascinating world of high-school football, and, beyond that, it is also about the death and rebirth of the American community. Albright uses football to explore our nation's complicated history of race and public education and to explain why some communities continue to thrive while others are slowly dying away.

"Sidelines" tells the story of nine very different communities across North Carolina, from deep in the Appalachian Mountains where a team of Cherokee Indians carry the hopes of an entire tribe on its shoulders, to military outposts where the War in Iraq dominates every aspect of daily life.

We meet resilient coaches in urban schools on the brink of state take-overs and men who lived through segregation, fire bombings, and shattered dreams. Sidelines profiles ordinary coaches and community leaders who do extraordinary things.

Albright uses nine North Carolina communities to tell this story: Cherokee, Asheville, Gastonia, Pilot Mountain, Winston-Salem, Durham, Fayetteville, Jacksonville, and New Bern. Calling on his extensive knowledge as a high school football coach and teacher, Albright creates a book of narrative nonfiction and history that is a passionate call

for social change.

Albright earned his B.A. in English and Creative Writing from UNC Chapel Hill and his M.Ed. from Harvard University. Albright has been at Durham Jordan, where he has been an English teacher and football coach for the past seven years. In 2006, Albright was named the Durham Public Schools Teacher of the Year. In 2008, he received the Milken

National Educator Award, dubbed the "Oscars of Teaching" by Teacher Magazine. He lives with his wife in Durham.

Albright was born and raised in Gastonia. He was captain of his high school football team, although he was, by his own admission, an average wide receiver at best. While at Harvard, Albright taught at Boston English High School, the oldest public high school in America but also one of Boston's lowest performing schools.

When he was only 26, Albright published "Blessed Returns", a memoir about a summer he spent working in the slums of Camden, New Jersey.

The Independent Weekly called "Blessed Returns" "an honest, tender account of an idealistic college student's full plunge into the real world," and the Courier-Post declared it to be "spare, unsentimental, yet genuinely moving."