Scott Pleasant

Scott Pleasant is the co-author (with Joe Oestreich) of Lines of Scrimmage: A Story of Football, Race, and Redemption. He also coordinates the Writing Center at Coastal Carolina University, a job he has held since 2010. In a teaching career that has spanned more than 25 years, Scott has taught writing, literature, research methods, and other courses not only at CCU, but at Auburn University, East Tennessee State University, and Northeast State Community College. For more detailed information on Scott, please visit the Bio page at http://scottpleasant.com.

Scott began working with Joe Oestreich on Lines of Scrimmage in early 2012. Joe is a member of the creative writing faculty at CCU, so he and Scott work closely together. Also, they have played music together for years, so the partnership is a natural one.

When Joe's first book, Hitless Wonder, was about to be published in 2012, Scott approached him with an idea for co-writing a book about the 1989 Conway (SC) High School football boycott. In that year, most of the black players on the Conway Tigers walked off the team in protest of the coach's decision to start a black quarterback (a rising senior) over a white quarterback (a rising junior). On the football field, the result was a team that went from having legitimate state-championship hopes to a team that won only one game all season. Off the field, the consequences were even more serious. The local school system suspended and then fired a teacher who had been serving as the boycotting players' spokesman and advisor when the superintendent determined that the teacher's activism in his role as the local NAACP president constituted a "disruption" to the learning environment. The resulting protests and marches came to be known as the Conway Movement, and media from all over the country (including Sports Illustrated, ABC News, and a host of prominent newspapers) ran stories about what was happening in Conway.

In the process of writing the book, Joe and Scott searched through all of the available news articles and other documents of the events of 1989, and they caught up with and interviewed many of the players, coaches, and community members involved in and touched by the story. They also spent more than a year as "embedded reporters" with the current-day Conway High School and Myrtle Beach High School football teams. Conway is still coached by Chuck Jordan, the same man who was at the helm for the Tigers in 1989. Myrtle Beach, Conway's biggest rival then and now, is coached by Mickey Wilson, the white quarterback at the center of the controversy in 1989.

The book is published by the University Press of Mississippi (2015).