PARADISE FOUND

A Los Angeles Times columnist follows the Paradise High School football team through its first season after the 2018 Camp Fire leveled its Northern California town.

Inevitably, this book will be compared to Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, but its story has more inherent drama. While the Camp Fire disaster has been skillfully reconstructed by others—including Lizzie Johnson in her recent Paradise—Plaschke focuses on the football team and athletic staff, especially the 60-year-old head coach, Rick Prinz. A former youth pastor who had planned to retire, Prinz stayed on after coming to believe with near-messianic zeal that his team could help the town recover by continuing to play its smash-mouth, championship-seeking brand of football, which traditionally had united residents (“Everyone around here needs hope….We’re going to try to be that hope,” he said). En route to what became an undefeated regular season in 2019, the team faced monumental odds. First the coaches and players, on gridlocked exit routes, fled a terrifying inferno that killed 86 people, some burned alive in their vehicles. All but three players lost their homes and scrambled to find makeshift living quarters, some as far as 90 minutes from Paradise. Then the team had to practice on a lot strewn with rocks and potholes in Chico and a home field with a “partially melted scoreboard.” The calamities left traumatized players with physical and emotional burdens ranging from anger and sadness to full-blown PTSD. Unlike Bissinger, Plaschke doesn’t delve into the morality of an obsession with winning (which, in this case, involved letting members play with a torn ACL and other injuries). Yet he’s a graceful and perceptive writer whose book works on its own terms, and because he tells a story with more big-picture stakes than that of Friday Night Lights, some readers may find it even more engaging.

A moving and well-told account of how a battered team regrouped after catastrophic losses.