[Stardust]

The Thanksgiving holiday revolves around food — turkey, dressing and pumpkin pie — and nobody can gobble up more of the good stuff than teen-aged boys.

Therein lies a potential problem for high school football teams playing in the state semifinals this week.

If Larry Linebacker or Ronnie Runningback ate too much on Thursday, they could be a bit sluggish or a step slow Friday night.

Do coaches worry about such things and warn their players not to overdo it at the Thanksgiving dinner table?

"Absolutely," Highlands Coach Dale Mueller said. "You can work hard all year long, and then eat like a pig on Thursday and you can't play well on Friday.

"You can mess things up a whole bunch of ways — how you eat, how you sleep, how you behave."

Somerset Coach Rob Lucas brought his players in for a Thursday morning practice before "getting them home to their families and the turkey, dressing and all the good stuff." He also planned to send them home with a warning. "We tell them to go easy, there'll be plenty of leftovers. We want them focusing on football because, trust me, these opportunities don't come around very often."

Bowling Green Coach Kevin Wallace said he was going to remind his players to push themselves away from the table, even though he doesn't think he needed to. "The kids who'll be playing in this game are thinking a whole lot more about Friday night than about Thanksgiving dinner. They're smart enough to realize this is the time of their lives. It's exciting for an athlete to be involved in this kind of situation."

Read more: http://www.kentucky.com/2011/11/25/19723...z1ej9Y7V7g