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SIERRA VISTA — How many pieces of bread are in a loaf of Fry’s-brand bread?
Twenty-four, minus the heels.
How many sandwiches can one make with a four-pound tub of peanut butter?
About 30, if the peanut butter is spread according to Debbie Grant’s standards.
  
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How many sack lunches does Mrs. Grant put together on an average night before an away freshman football game?
Forty-six, with two sandwiches in each bag, plus a bag of chips, a banana and cookies. Three of those sacks are extra, just in case, for tonight’s game.
The numbers vary a little from year to year, but Mrs. Grant’s dedication to her weekly project has been consistent for the past seven years.
Grant spends evenings before every freshman, junior varsity and varsity away football game building sack lunches for each player on the team to eat on game day.
Originally, she meant for the kids to eat them on the bus, but most of the time, the brown paper sacks are empty before the players even leave the locker room.
It all started when her own son Mannie was on the football team in 2002, and Grant packed food for each of his games. He shared with his friends who were looking for something to munch on before playing.
Soon after, she realized how many players have to go from school straight to the bus, and spend two hours running up and down the field on an empty stomach. There’s quite a lapse between the lunch hour and game time.
Grant would have none of that.
Now she’s on a mission. Not for recognition or praise.
She just wants to feed her boys.
“With my son, I wanted him to have the energy to get out there and run that field,” Grant said. “I don’t know anything about football, but win or lose, they’re out there to have fun. They need all the support they can get either way.”
Grant has five kids of her own, the oldest 26 and the youngest 5, plus five grandchildren running around her house that get her up at 6 a.m. and keep her going until she puts them all to sleep at 8:30. That’s when the sandwich making starts.
She used to be up until 1 a.m. fixing lunches for the next day, until a few others volunteered to spread peanut butter alongside her last year.
Dot Jenkins and Crystal Schilling stepped in this year. They swear Grant never asked for any help.
“The only reason we’re here is because we forced our way in,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins has two grandsons on the team, one on freshman and one on JV. Schilling has a son on the freshman team.
Wednesday night, the three women had a regimented system with Schilling in the dining room stuffing lines of sacks — already topped off with “Good luck!” and a happy face written with a black marker on the side of each one — with bananas, chips and cookies, and Jenkins in the kitchen neatly spreading peanut butter to cover every corner of each slice.
Grant picked up a spoon and quickly, but evenly, took care of the jelly slices.
“This is stuff that I never ate as a kid, so I don’t really even like it,” she said. “But I’ve got it down to a science. I could probably do it in my sleep.”
Grant said she knows how much the players appreciate her work, but never thought they noticed the little things, like the note on the side of the bag.
After a long day of practice, at the mention of Mrs. Grant and her lunches, junior linebacker DeAndre Little’s face lit up.
“I like the cookies,” he said. “And the pasta salad. Oh man. It’s just so good. We all appreciate her a lot. Teenagers and food, they go hand in hand.”
The varsity team members are the only ones who get the famed pasta salad added to the menu.
She sends forks, spoons and bowls with the 15-pound dish that almost never makes it to the coaches if they don’t get there before the players do.
At the beginning of the season, she made half the usual batch for the varsity team, since she wasn’t sure if everyone liked pasta salad. There wasn’t enough.
“They eat it all,” she said. “Nothing ever comes back but an empty bowl and an empty spoon.”
She said her husband, Calvin, a volunteer assistant coach for the freshman team, thinks she worries too much about what the players will like.
She almost never uses the heels. She asks about food allergies. She noted two varsity players, one who wanted an only-jelly sandwich and another who wanted an only-peanut butter sandwich.
She finds out when the freshman team isn’t stopping to eat on the way home, and packs an extra sandwich to eat after the game.
“I’ll pack them anything that gives them carbs and protein,” she said. “A few years ago, I was giving apples and oranges, but I ran into problems because some of the kids had braces. And then they said they’d been having problems with cramping up during the games, and I said I have to pack bananas. We’ve had very few instances of cramping since I started packing bananas.”
If there’s extra sandwiches on Wednesday night for either the freshmen or JV, those are sent to whichever team is at home in case there are a few players who can’t get away from the school before the game.
How many Buena football players walk on the field with growling stomachs?
Only the ones who don’t partake in Mrs. Grant’s labors are at a lack for nourishment.
“None of my boys go out there hungry,” she said. “I’ve always wanted a big family, and now I have one in more ways than one.”
Mom of a Football Player wrote on Oct 18, 2008 2:19 AM: