The High Pressure Of 'Two-A-Days'

Football is a way of life in "Two-A-Days: Hoover High." (Paramount Home Entertainment)

"Two-A-Days: Hoover High -- The Complete First Season" takes viewers into worlds that are often mysterious to outsiders. The MTV series explores the inner workings of a football team and, perhaps even less-charted territory, being a teenager.

The series, over the course of nine episodes, focuses on the Hoover High School Buccaneers of Hoover, Ala., which is just outside Birmingham. Like everywhere else in the state, they take their football seriously there. Don't try to go shopping in Hoover during a game, as many stores close for the event. Sure, "Friday Night Lights" glorified Texas high school football, but when it comes to football, Texas has nothing on Alabama, where the joke goes, "There are three sports in the state of Alabama -- college football, spring practice and recruiting." Of course, the recruits come from high schools, and you're likely to see some Hoover Buccaneers on the rosters of big-time college programs: The Buccaneers won the state football championship five times between 2000 and 2005 (the Bucs lost in the 2006 title game a couple of weeks ago) and are often ranked as one of the top 10 high school teams in the nation.

"Two-A-Days" ($38.99) gives you a glimpse of the pressure these kids feel as they compete in a program that has been nicknamed "The University of Hoover" (the team's stadium seats 20,000). Their coaches, in particular head coach Russ Propst, can be a volatile bunch, unleashing a verbal dressing-down during a game for missed assignments and other boneheaded plays. Of course, those same coaches can be a player's biggest supporters at other times.

But the series isn't all football. In fact, it actually spends as much or more time away from the field and locker room. And if you think there's pressure in maintaining a championship tradition, try being a teenager on the dating scene. This being an MTV reality series, such soapy issues as did he or didn't he arise concerning one football player, the girl he's dating and the other girl he may have started seeing.

Of course, there are also parental pressures that all the kids have to cope with.

It adds up to a program with the broad appeal that had one co-worker, a female college student, saying, "I love that show," the day after another colleague said, "My husband is addicted to that program." Good news for them, a second season of the show will begin airing in a few weeks.

Coach Propst, whose tactics and occasional pointed profanity may surprise those with a rosy view of how a high school coach acts, summed it up to the Associated Press earlier this year: "Is there anything in life that is all positive, all the time? If anyone tells you there is, they're lying. Everything is not all roses and cherries. This is the good, the bad and the ugly of what a good program in the state of Alabama is all about."

Not to mention the good, the bad and the ugly of being a teenager.