By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 6, 2007; E01

After 20 minutes spent painting the Robinson High School football field, Mike McGurk already had ruined his third outfit of the day. White paint covered his brown tennis shoes. Blades of grass clung to his athletic socks. His black cotton shorts and blue T-shirt were drenched with sweat. McGurk would have considered changing outfits again, but he didn't have any clean clothes left.

McGurk, the Robinson athletic director, had barely begun his most difficult week of the year, but already he felt like Sisyphus. He pushed a $1,000 paint machine up the field, stopping every yard to bend and paint, bend and paint, before shoving the machine forward again. Finally, exhausted, McGurk shook the sweat off his sunglasses and looked back at his progress. He had only covered 15 yards.

"This will probably take me another three hours," McGurk said. "But at least when I finish, I'll be done with about one-fiftieth of my to-do list."

While Robinson students reveled in their final week of summer vacation, McGurk and several other athletic volunteers sometimes worked from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. to set up the Robinson football team's home opener against Lake Braddock on Aug. 30. Among other chores, McGurk and his volunteers arranged for police coverage at the game, organized 3,000 individual items to be sold at the snack shop, raised an American flag over the field, hung sponsorship banners, tested the public-address system and edited the football program.

It was a hectic and stressful rush, one that will be repeated this weekend across the Washington area when more than 100 schools host their first home football games of the 2007 season (most public schools in Virginia opened play last week). Even though McGurk had repeated this 75-hour week for five home openers as Robinson's athletic director, he walked around school with a checklist jammed in his pocket, terrified that he would forget something.

"Everything has to be in place, really has to be perfect," McGurk said. "More people will see your stadium and make an impression of the school based on that facility than on anything else. People almost never go inside your school, but everybody sees the field. That's where they see what you're all about."

With that in mind, McGurk spent much of last week standing alone on a field of Bermuda grass, obsessing over hundreds of white lines. He used a metal detector to find spikes planted underground, which designated the Robinson sidelines. Then McGurk outlined the rectangular field grid, sprayed lines across the grass every five yards and meticulously spaced out four rows of one-yard hash marks. By the time he finished painting late on the Tuesday afternoon before the game, McGurk had used more than 25 gallons of white paint.

"Some people look at me, all covered in this white mess, and ask why we don't have a ground crew or something," McGurk said. "But that's not the way it works in high schools. Everybody pitches in on everything."

None of the mothers who arrived just after 7 on Tuesday night had spent much time working at the Robinson football snack shop. They had volunteered to be here because, frankly, the job sounded remarkably simple. How hard could it be to make popcorn? Except now, confronted with a strange machine, a few milk jugs filled with kernels and 500 red-and-white-striped FRESH POPCORN boxes, nothing about this assignment seemed effortless.

"I don't know where to start, you guys," said Linda Stewart, one of the mothers. "We'd better call Ted."

Five minutes later, Ted Kornhoff sprinted through the door of the wooden shack located behind the end zone of the Robinson football field, threw his arms out to the side and announced: "It's okay! Ted's here!"

Kornhoff had volunteered at the shop since his daughter began her freshman year at Robinson in the mid-1990s. It was a story Kornhoff now loved to retell as joke: "My kids have moved on, but I haven't," he said. "I never miss a football game."

As the sun dipped below the stadium bleachers, Kornhoff turned on the popcorn machine, poured in two cups of kernels and asked the three women to form an assembly line behind him. One woman poured the popped corn into a box, another sprinkled each box with seasoning and the third placed the boxes into a large red crate, where they would be stored until just before Thursday night's kickoff.

"This is like practice for Thursday night," Kornhoff told the three women as he poured more popcorn kernels into the machine. "It's going to be crazy in here. You've got to work fast, fast, fast. We operate like a machine. It's actually amazing."

His Outback restaurant in Arlington was scheduled to stay closed for another three hours, but co-owner Keith Kirkland unlocked the front door at 1 p.m. on Thursday and walked into the kitchen. He boiled 15 pounds of pasta and cooked 80 chicken breasts. Then he warmed more than 50 loaves of rye bread and turned on the lights in his dining room.

During the next two hours, more than 70 Robinson football players and coaches rotated through the restaurant -- and Kirkland fed all of them, for free, as he always had. It was a tradition that had preceded each Robinson game since 1993, when Outback first agreed to provide a pregame meal for the team in exchange for free advertising at Robinson home games.

"One thing I've learned," Kirkland said, "is that you can't cook these kids too much."

Last Thursday, seven parent volunteers dressed as waitresses, and they carried out trays of fettuccine and platters of bread. To supplement Kirkland's cooking, parents brought a cake, three boxes of chocolate chip cookies and 40 bananas. Diane Dempsey, the lead parent volunteer, hurried from table to table and refilled waters. She planned to spend four hours at Outback; she would set the tables and then stay to clean them. She hoped to finish in time to drive to Robinson and watch her son, Jimmy, play linebacker.

"As long as I'm done before kickoff, that's all I care about," Diane said. "I'll stay here all day if I have to."

Tony Hedgepeth whirled around in the Robinson parking lot and saw three school buses rolling toward him. He held up his right hand, motioning for the driver of the first bus to stop.

"What are these buses doing?" Hedgepeth said. "They've made this a mess."

Hedgepeth had expected the buses carrying football players and coaches from Lake Braddock High School. But he had expected them to use the opposite entrance to the parking lot. By approaching from the wrong side, the Lake Braddock buses had blocked Robinson's faculty parking lot. Hedgepeth marched over to the first idled bus and knocked on the driver's door.

In the 25 years since he graduated from Robinson, Hedgepeth had spent a good chunk of his free time volunteering for the school's athletic department. His domain consisted of a series of odd jobs crucial to hosting a game. He placed pylons of the field, roped off a section of the bleachers for booster-club members and guided opposing teams into the visiting locker room. Hedgepeth knew, better than anybody, that buses could only use one entrance at Robinson. And this wasn't it.

"Hey, wrong way," Hedgepeth told a Lake Braddock assistant coach who had walked off the bus. "You have to pull the buses back around and come in the other side."

"Come on, man," the coach said. "This is fine."

"No," Hedgepeth said. "Pull them around. You're blocking traffic here."

The coach rolled his eyes.

"Okay, that's fine," he said. "We'll just drop the kids off here and then move the buses. We'll be out of your hair in five minutes. We've got to get these kids ready for a game."

"Fine" Hedgepeth said. "But if you did it my way, this could have been easy."

With both football teams still in their locker rooms, the Robinson stadium looked more like the host of a state fair than a high school game. Fifteen parent volunteers wore yellow security jackets and guarded the field perimeter. Cheerleaders walked through the stands and sold flowers and teddy bears as country music blared from the stadium speakers.

McGurk, the athletic director, stood on the school track in the center of the chaos with a radio attached to his hip. It crackled to life every few minutes. How in the world did wasps get inside the ticket booth? Why wasn't there an administrator in the press box?

Fifteen minutes before the kickoff -- before Robinson scored on its first drive and set the foundation for a 21-0 win -- McGurk saw his wife and two children walking into the stands. McGurk muted his radio and waved at his 7-year-old son.

"At least I think that's my son," McGurk said. "I've been so busy, this is actually the first time I've seen him all week."