ABSTRACT
High school sports have increasingly been at the forefront of military recruitment efforts. Such efforts can be seen perhaps most vividly in the development of high school football all-star games: first, the US Army All-American Bowl and, later, the Semper Fidelis All-American Bowl, sponsored by the US Marine Corps. This chapter discusses the text of these two bowls in the context of the games themselves, as well as the marketing and promotions that surround them. It then offers a rhetorically grounded critique of the ways that high school football has become increasingly implemented in a troublingly militaristic culture. The obvious presence of sponsorship demonstrates how much high school football shares with its more obviously commercialized older siblings, the National Football League (NFL) and the National Collegiate Athletics Association. As a professional league, the NFL is itself a corporate entity that has crafted itself among the most powerful brand identities in American culture.
