I am a big fan of high-school football coaches. Starting with the guy (Jim Young) I played for in high school and continuing on through nearly every prep football coach I came in contact with during my four decades in sports journalism.

I guessed, in this blog post, that I covered around 400 prep football games in my career. And I’d hazard I enjoyed covering about 375 of them.

Prep football is like no other variety of the game, for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is the often-charismatic men who coach the teams.

They bring a tool box of skills to the football field — physical stamina, knowledge of the game, enthusiasm, an ability to teach, leadership … and a skill for getting 16- and 17-year-old kids to accept teamwork and discipline.

John Tyree is one of the best I encountered at coaching young football players … and certainly one of the most deeply experienced.

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Seems like every little town in this part of France has its own, slightly different holiday traditions.

This one puts up lots of lights. That one has a big musical event in the church. The one over there has the Christmas Eve service and the trucked-in kiddie rides in the place.

And lots of people invite friends into their homes for mulled wine or hot-and-spiced cider.

We have been happy and impressed with what is going on in our part of the Languedoc.

To recap:

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If you had told me, when I left the Inland Empire in 2008, that a high school basketball team from that area would be ranked No. 1 in the country within a decade …

I probably would have laughed at the idea.

And if pushed to declare which school might have become nationally relevant in boys bkb, it would not have been Chino Hills High School.

But such are the demographic changes in the region, and such is the talent of one particular family whose sons are attending Chino Hills, that the public school’s hoops team was the consensus “best in the country” choice after going 35-0 during the 2015-16 season.

Then, as now, Chino Hills is powered by the Ball Boys.

Last year, it was eldest son Lonzo, who averaged a triple double (23.9 ppg, 11.3 rpg, 11.5 apg) in 32-minute games and was the USA Today, Naismith and MaxPreps player of the year.

With Lonzo Ball now tearing it up at UCLA, which is 10-0 and ranked No. 2 in the nation (with a victory over Kentucky), it is up to younger brothers LaMelo and LiAngelo to carry the load at Chino Hills, and so far they are doing fine.

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The NFL has seen a surge of player jerseys with more than just one name above the big number on a guy’s back.

I am perhaps late to noticing this because while living in Abu Dhabi the NFL was pretty much inaccessible. I missed about six years of developments while there.

Including the arrival of Jr, Sr, III, IV and, yes, even a V, on uniforms.

Apparently, the trend goes back to one player.

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Two remarkable events occurred this month involving major North American sports leagues.

The NBA and Major League Baseball agreed to new collective bargaining agreements with their players.

Before the old CBA ran out.

No weeks or months of acrimony between deadlocked players and management. No games lost to a strike or a lockout. No seasons put at risk.

For which all fans are quite happy … if not necessarily grateful … that management and labor showed the wit not to interrupt the gravy train that is modern team sports.

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Like many notions that float through the mind of senior citizens, I have no idea where this came from.

But, bang, there it was. A recollection of the opening of a television show that appeared 50 years ago, soon followed by a fairly accurate recitation of the lyrics to the theme song of that show.

Was the song really memorable? Or do old people have an odd ability to clearly recall something from their youth — as opposed to what happened a week ago?

The series was called Branded and starred Chuck Connors as a disgraced former U.S. army officer.

Connors being drummed out of the army is demonstrated during  the theme song, which also explains the star’s burden in life. And it all is wonderfully cheesy and overwrought … clearly, a song of earworm quality.

“All but one man died

“There at Bitter Creek

“And they say he ran away.

“Branded! Marked with a coward’s shame …”

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Ask American sports fans what he or she can tell you about the New York Cosmos … and I’m guessing 90 percent of them will say, “Zip. Nada”.

Maybe 1 percent will say, “Cosmos? Did you mean Galaxy?”

The Cosmos were the American soccer team that the rest of the world sorta cared about. Without Americans sharing that fondness.

Remember 1970s stars Pele, Beckenbauer, Chinaglia? Knocking around a soccer ball in NYC while playing in the North America Soccer League?

You may not, but rest assured every middle-aged soccer journalist on the eastern side of the Atlantic knows all about the Cosmos and gets more than a little verklempt just thinking about them in their glory days … 40 years ago.

Now, the Cosmos appears to be disappearing into a black hole for the second time, and again foreign journalists seem to feel obliged to tell American fans what they are missing.

Take, for instance, this piece in The Guardian, the British newspaper.

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Jeff Fisher was fired as coach of the Los Angeles Rams today, but he leaves the National Football League as No. 1 in one significant career statistic.

His teams have lost 165 games. No coach in NFL history has lost more.

Fisher shares the record for most defeats with Dan Reeves, but Reeves won 190 regular-season games, 17 more than Fisher’s total of 173.

Granted, the Rams are 4-9, and that alone is enough to get a guy fired, even one week after it was revealed Fisher had received a contract extension through the 2017 season.

But we have to wonder whether the Rams didn’t want to be Fisher’s team of record when (as opposed to if) he lost that 166th game.

The Rams have been thrashed in three consecutive defeats, and the sight of them falling behind 42-0 at home yesterday … well, that was ugly.

Have to figure that ends Fisher’s career as a coach. Who is going to hire a guy with “most defeats” on his resume? (Dan Reeves never coached again, after he broke the record for defeats.)

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Another Christmas season overseas, another British-themed Christmas service, my seventh in eight years.

We have done enough of these now that I even know the music to “Once in Royal David’s City”, which apparently starts every British Christmas service — at least among Protestants.

In Abu Dhabi, the Anglican events tended to follow the regular order of service, with carols and candlelight employed for the final stages. And was done on Christmas Eve.

In the south of France, where British expats are numerous and perhaps more traditional, they seem to prefer the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, which was popularized in the Anglican church, starting at Cambridge, in the latter stages of the 19th century. Even now, the BBC broadcasts it, via radio, from Cambridge on Christmas Eve.

What the “Nine Lessons” does is focus the service on nine Biblical readings pertaining to Jesus’s birth … with lots of carols worked in and around the readings.

Turns out, the old familiar words of Isaiah and Luke and traditional carols are the bits worshipers seem to be most interested in, this time of year.

And they were interested. The service this afternoon, in a large Catholic church at a nearby town, drew a standing-room-only crowd of 250-plus.

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Certain great sports rivalries tend to attract and then polarize fans.

Not much gray area when you consider Real Madrid and Barcelona. The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. Federer and Nadal.

And, in Amercan college football, Army and Navy.

I am an Army fan. I’m not exactly sure why, but I am.

Perhaps because I instantly got seasick, as a child. Probably because my military-history-crazed mind found army campaigns more interesting than the naval versions.

Most Americans will have a preference based on personal history with the army or navy, or family or friends having been soldiers or seamen. Especially over the past century, which saw the U.S. in lots of wars, big and small.

But my father did not serve. Neither did my cousins. My grandfathers each were in the Navy during World War I, but I never met either man.

Apparently, then, I made my own decision … and it was Army. I want Army to beat Navy. Always.

But I had not gotten my wish for a long time. Fifteen years, to be more specific. Army had last defeated their arch-rivals on the football field in 2001.

Before today.

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