NOTE: I recently came across an article I wrote in 1981 about the first Friday night high school football game in Northern Kentucky that was played under the lights on Oct. 3, 1931. Here’s a revised version of the article to celebrate the 94th anniversary of the ground-breaking game.
By Terry Boehmker
NKyTribune sports reporter
When Northern Kentucky high school athletic directors sit down to calculate gate receipts from Friday night’s games, they should offer a memorial salute to William “Blue” Foster.”
On Oct. 3, 1931, Foster organized this area’s first Friday night high school football game between his Newport Wildcats and the Lloyd Juggernauts.
The game reportedly attracted more than 1,000 fans who paid two bits (25 cents) to get into Andrews Field at 11th and Lowell Streets in Newport. There were hundreds more who watched the game for free by climbing to the top of the stadium’s wooden fence or stopping on the walkway of the 12th Street Bridge that overlooked the field.
“I think coach Foster was a showman at heart. He used to always promote things like that,” said Clayton Lepper, who played in the Newport backfield during the 1931 season.
“He was the one who got the Andrews Company to put up those lights in the first place,” Lepper said of his former coach. “They were playing night baseball in some places by then, and I think everybody agreed that was the opening of a better way of attracting people who couldn’t get there during the day. People were working six days a week in those days and they couldn’t get off work to see a football game.”
For most of the student-athletes involved in that historic game, it marked the first time they got to play in front of their parents. But only the Newport fans went home happy. The Wildcats whipped the Juggernauts, 60-6, behind the rushing of Lepper and teammate Gordy Walz, who had a 55-yard touchdown run on the first play of the game.
“We just thought it was a fad,” said Fred Knapp, an offensive end for Newport in the game. “The lights weren’t that good. It was kind of like playing on a cloudy, rainy day. But we didn’t have much trouble. We didn’t have those complicated plays that they have now. It was all pretty much straight-ahead football.”
Knapp was surprised that Foster agreed to have the football painted white for the night game.
He said their coach was the one who designed Newport’s uniforms with dark panels under each sleeve to make the ball harder to detect for opposing defensive players looking to make a tackle.
“I guess he wanted to be fair once in a while,” Knapp said with a hearty laugh.
Newport won its first eight games that season with three played under the lights. Four of the victories were against Cincinnati high schools Purcell, Roger Bacon, Elder and St. Xavier. But the Wildcats lost to Holmes, 13-0, in the traditional Thanksgiving Day game between the two teams that closed out the season.
High school football playoffs in Kentucky did not start until 1959.