Friday Night Lights is the story of A Town, A Team, A Dream, and the documentation of the 1988 season of the Permian High School Football team in Odessa, Texas. The Pulitzer Prize winning author, H.G. Bissenger, covers the happenings from the end of the 1987 season to the very end of the 1988 season in Friday Night Lights. The book also shows how one sport, one game, can change a whole town, be it for the good, or for the bad. The small town of Odessa, Texas bases their entire life on the Fridays of September trough December, and it's magical sight every time those lights illuminate the field every week. But, despite the glory, the teenagers and coaches apart of the highly valued team are put under immense pressure to perform at astonishing level. Bissinger shows the player's reactions to this pressure and portrays many important issues like race relations, and parent's relations with their children.
             In 1988, the author H.G. Bissenger traveled to the small, impoverished town of Odessa, Texas. Living in suburbia Philadelphia, and realizing he was a middle aged man, Bissenger was overcome with many push and pull factors on traveling to Odessa. Maybe it was that he was addicted to sports in his past or maybe it was the simple yet complex notion that a high school sport can pull a town together. To understand this, a person may have to first realize their own definition of sport. A denotation to the word sport may be: a physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively. To Odessa, a sport can be a phenomenon that can reveal many different things about a town. Bissenger traveled to west Texas and convinced the head coach of the Panthers, Gary Gaines to be apart of the team for one year; to document and further explore this previous thought of how one team could change and influence a town of 100,000.
             Odessa in the 1980s was like America in the 1930s. It was ...