Sports Briefs: Dressed for High School Athletics

Dillard's, Old Navy and the like can discontinue their annual "hot new styles and fashions" routine that begins each school year and ends around the time Mom or Dad receives a Discover card bill that is as thick as a small phone book.

Enough with the disconcerting (or, as Andy Griffith might say, "disconcertin'") notion that coolness is available in cotton, sizes Small to X-Large. If a person isn't already all that and a bag of potato chips, yo, hoping to make said person cool by bedecking them in $15 T-shirts from American Eagle is more futile than getting vital information from Bill Belichick.

Coolness cannot be purchased for a mere $15; it costs $20 instead (at least for T-shirts).

Visiting www.PrepSportsWear.com/ enables one to be dressed in the school team and colors of their choice. Granted, wearing school colors is a practice that begins at age 4, when preschool youngerts begin experimenting with their crayons and wind up penetrating every orifice possible before finally deciding to stick their colors in their hair.

And Crayola is cheaper than the $20 shirts offered online, but unless you live in Hoover, Ala., where else can you purchase an orange "Hoover Buccaneers" T-shirt that looks like it came from your older cousin's wardrobe in the '80s?

"Your Team. Your Gear. Your Way." is the company's slogan, establishing themselves as the Burger King Imitators of the online clothing industry. But the Web site's home page, which features a list of every state in the country (plus the District of Columbia and Guam, as well), can be considered virtual ecstasy by those wishing to wear something no one else in their neighborhood wears.

After choosing the state, one gets to selects the first letter of the town's name from an alphabetical list. And under each letter is a list of every town in the state that sports a high school.

Once the school is chosen, then all the products available for that school are shown (including T-shirts, sweatshirts, golf shirts, shorts, duffle bags, rally towels and much more), which can be printed with any sport (cheerleading, band and chess even)--no matter if your high school offers it or not.

Which means that wearing an Olney Cubs (my Texas high school) Ping Pong shirt is a distinct possibility for me. I would be wearing one now, if I only had my arms free to fight off all the females who would be pursuing me.

The athletic gear would normally be considered the cool part. But for those interested in merely window shopping, there is no better place to find out the mascot and school colors for any school in the country.

Wear a Sleepy Hollow (New York) Horsemen Wrestling sweatshirt to your California high school, or bring a Salem (Massachusetts) Witches Football fleece blanket to your Friday night game in Ohio. And for Christmas, go out in the yard and play catch in a North Pole (Alaska) Patriots Basketball tee that will cause people to confuse you for Buddy the Elf.

Assuming the reader has passed the 12th grade, high school shirts were more readily available than zits for at least four years of one's life. But unless one hasn't grown since high school, those shirts would probably look better on a water buffalo.

Unfortunately, there is no Bayside Tigers shirt, but you can still look like a preppy in a Jacoby Creek Elementary School (Bayside, Calif.) Panthers shirt. That ought to be enough to make A.C. Slater jealous.