“Sports were everything to me,” recalled Michael Messner as he reflected on his years growing up in Salinas. Michael’s father, Russ Messner, was a beloved basketball coach at Salinas High School from 1947 until his death in 1977.

“During my boyhood and early adolescence, I felt like the luckiest kid in town while serving as the towel boy for my dad’s team. In 1969-70 I was the starting point guard on his team. My two sisters, Terry and Melinda, were also graduated from SHS. Terry was head cheerleader in 1965.”

Michael Messner’s father bequeathed 25 copies of the Salinas High School Yearbook, El Gabilan, to him.

In the mid-2000s, Michael realized those yearbooks revealed an important, albeit unconventional, lens for him to better understand the historical evolution of gender and sports, a longtime area of scholarly expertise for the sociologist. He eventually accumulated 100 volumes and conducted an in-depth study of their significance and meaning.

Born and raised in Salinas, Michael has fond memories of the city and Salinas High, but did not want to base his analysis on memory alone. He acknowledged that “nostalgia can be a rose-colored lens on the past that renders us vulnerable…[returning] us to a time that we imagine having been so much better than today.”

He was determined to analyze the yearbooks as dispassionately as possible and aimed to show both change and continuity in the organization and meaning of sports, cheering, coaching, and student life.

“The High School” — enriched with 270 photographs from yearbooks old and recent — is the result.

A key concept that runs through “The High School” is “the unevenness of social change.” Historians and sociologists know that the past is “not a simple story of linear progress.”

Rather, “it can move forward, backward and sideways.” For example, Messner shows that girls’ high school sports were thriving in the 1910s. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s girls were relegated to the sidelines, mostly locked out of competing in interscholastic sports until after the 1972 passage of Title IX.

In the run-up to World War II, the Girls’ Athletic Association (GAA) organized a range of mostly intramural girls’ high school sports. Notably, Japanese American girls in Salinas were frequently standout GAA athletes.

Messner also explores how cheerleading evolved to reflect shifting views of gender. In the early 20th century, boys exclusively held the highly valued position of “yell leaders.”

As girls’ sports were devalued in subsequent decades, high-status girl cheerleaders propelled school spirit for boys’ sports, just as the football hero ascended as a paragon of masculinity on campus. In recent years, as girls’ sports ascended, cheer has morphed into a hybrid activity — providing sideline support for boys’ sports, while also competing in their own highly athletic cheer events.

“The High School” raises important questions about sports as drivers of gender relations in American schools. Today, in a time of growing equity, why do girls’ sports routinely have different rules from boys’ sports?

Girls’ flag football, for instance, is now booming. Some ask, why don’t girls play tackle football like the boys do?

Messner suggests that this reflects outmoded protective legislation that sees girls and women as fragile, but he also asks a different question:

Now that we know of the health dangers of tackle football, why do we continue to celebrate this game for boys?

An exploration of the shifting historical meanings of football sheds light on these questions.

Messner will discuss “The High School” at three public events in Salinas: Thursday, 5 p.m. at the Salinas Public Library, El Gabilan Branch; Friday, 6-9 p.m. at Downtown Book and Sound; Saturday,5:30-7 p.m. at the National Steinbeck Center.