Boom. The ball is kicked into the air by Southeast High School’s JV kicker, the ball screams down to our return man, and one of my two best friends on the team, Reese, as he gears up to run it back. A kick-off at a High School JV football game is nothing like what you think it is, it’s actually much slower and there are no body-flailing hits happening during the first contacts of the game. The official kick-off was a toe dip in the 48 minute battle that was to ensue. Thinking about our last game of the season I suddenly become aware of the locker room noise and my two friends Brennan and Reese talking to me about some homework assignment we all had. “Sauhn tell me why we gotta do dis freakin’ essay two weeks before break” said Brennan, Reese chimes in “It’s probably cause we didn’t have one last quarter and everyone was complaining about the lack of grades”. All of this didn’t matter to me as I was changing out of my school clothes and into my workout clothes. I couldn’t help but flashback to that thursday night again.
Breathing hard from the sudden exertion, I came into the huddle with my head slightly spinning. I thought to myself “We beat ‘em last year, we can beat ‘em again”. There were just two crucial factors that I was purposely not taking into account, the fact that we had only won 2 games this year (and lost five), and the fact that the sophomores who are now juniors weren’t on the same field with us; they had carried us last year. Brent, our quarterback, calls the play “Trio Right 25 Zebra”. That means a zone run play going my way, at first I was confident that we could run the play since we’d already ran it like a thousand times this year, but this was my first contact, how would I know if the kid from Southeast in front of me isn’t a Division 1 prospect in the making? Didn’t matter, Brent was already calling the snap count.
“Aight boy, 10 reps, bang ‘em out” my friend Brennan said to me over the boom of the weight room buzz, a collective mixture of metal of on metal and rap/hip-hop music. I was squatting underneath the barbell and getting ready to do my next set. “God, I hate 10-8-6 week” I said to myself. At this point I proceeded to lift the weight off the rack, onto my back and began the exercise. The familiar burn of muscle cells being broken down within my legs and the saturation of my skin by sweat reminded me to ask myself, once again, why I do this everyday. For about 45 seconds, I forgot about the Southeast game and was wrapped up in simply breathing and keeping my balance. Afterwards, my mind took me back again, and it would keep doing so.
Hut! That means, go, Go, GO! Go as hard as you can and as fast as you can to the linebacker, leaving the man in front of me to Brent and Reese so they can trick him into tackling one of them while the other makes a break for it. I try my best to stay low and use leverage but at the same time moving fast enough to be able to meet the linebacker, who for the moment was trying to read the play. I make contact, drive my feet and lock my hands deep into his shoulder pads. As he tries to twist away I try to anticipate his movements in order to stay in front of him. Locked in a delicate dance, I manage to at least occupy him for the remainder of the play but Reese only ends up going five yards up the field. Two plays later, I’m squatting over the ball getting ready to long snap it back to our punter on 4th down. Two series later Reese scores on a tough five yard run after a couple of nice throws by Brent. I couldn’t believe it, we actually scored first on Southeast. Southeast has always been a powerhouse in county, heck, our state. Unbelievable.
Squats all done, I let myself have a small sip of water and came back just in time for plyometrics. I could not describe the fear and hatred I possessed at the same time for this so-called exercise. I had already busted up my shins twice on the stupid high box which came up to my waist and was both psychologically and physically hard to get onto by means of jumping from a standstill. It is simply unnatural for someone to even attempt jumping such a height, yet I had to admire the guys who did it 20 times, barely breaking a sweat or making a sound. The things I did to myself for football had no explanation. It was work or be outworked, and it definitely shows up on the field when the fall season rolls around.

Back to the game, our defense somehow managed to snub their quarterback who was a mini-me version of Southeast’s prodigal Varsity quarterback. This kid had somehow managed to copy everything that the Varsity QB wore during game. There’s rumors he wore the exact same one-sleeved shirt underneath his pads and the same glove on the same hand. I guess he literally had big shoes to fill. We were on offense again and Brent was excited coming into the huddle “Spread 20 Flat Pass on Beta” he said, as soon as he did it all of the receivers’ faces lit up. We never passed, NEVER. Reese, our running back, was pretty much used to being banged up after every game because Coach’s play-calling consisted of 85% running plays. This time after “Hut!” I took a series of short, rapid backwards step opening up my left side and protecting my inside as our offensive line formed the pocket for Brent. Pass blocking was actually a lot easier than having to run at someone and forcibly move them when they didn’t want to be moved. The kid across from me turned out not to be a D1 recruit and although it wasn’t easy I managed to keep him off of Brent by locking my hands in his pads and moving my feet in order to stay in front of him. We drove down the field with Coach calling straight pass plays. Again, Reese punches it in and we’re a couple minutes from beating Southeast at the half 14-0.
I looked over at Brennan and Reese next to me. My actual friends on the team. We had gravitated towards each other like celestial bodies, freshman year, due to the simple fact that we could not stand our teammates’, unfortunate and through no fault of their own, lack of intellectual normality. That said, we came together and have yet to come apart, one of the few things that I could be proud to say I did with my time as a high school football player was to gain two exceptional friends/teammates. We, of course, had no illusions of going to college playing this game, but it sure beats sitting at home complaining about homework on Facebook. I guess if I was going to kill myself doing push-ups with anyone, it would be those two guys.
Dream over. Southeast scores on their next series with Mini-me quarterback throwing a zinger to his wide receiver. Our next series we couldn’t get anything going at all and I was off the field for defense after the punt. But something big was about to happen, Reese played both ways, he was just that good, it also helped that he ran track and had played football since Pop Warner. Coach liked him for his ability to be all over the field. Lo and behold Mini-me drops back for the 30th time in the game looking for a receiver, but this time something’s different. Reese manages to somehow read Mini-me’s eyes and after he releases it, Reese manages to jump the ball mid-air, perform an acrobatic spin and make the interception with nothing but open turf in front of him. The (small) crowd goes electric as our sidelines (including me) goes nuts as he dodges Mini-me on his way to the end zone.
At this point in the workout, I was simply out of breath and my mind was almost numb. I was dripping in sweat like I had been trying to eat a giant steak or something and nothing was on my mind besides getting this wretched workout done. At moments like this I always remember Brennan saying “Sauhn, you gotta put in da hard work” with Reese right behind him “You’re just supposed to do it, everyone else in the county does, just suck it up”. My question is then, “Why do we all do it?”. Statistics show that only 1% of high school football players actually make it to the NFL. That 1% certainly did not include the 3 of us. Holding on to the slipping hope that we might make the playoffs one day before we graduated only managed to sustain us for about 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time, I don’t know how we do it.
20-7 at the half. Our corner of the field where we took our halftime break was humming, Coach had just given his mid-game talk and we actually felt like we had a chance of winning. The third quarter flew by with back to back scores accompanied by the fact that both defenses seemed to have forgotten there was a second half to football. Our offense tried our best to keep up but Mini-me was finding his rhythm. After a couple of bad series, Southeast took the lead 29-28. We had only managed to score once since the half and there were only 10 minutes left in the game.
In football winning is different, as it stands, Varsity football is the only sport in this county where every team does not automatically make the playoffs, meaning the bare minimum number of games for a Varsity team is 10 games a year (8 is all you get on JV). As compared to every other sport where the playoffs are not necessarily an accomplishment, more games means almost the world to anyone who’s been a part of any football program. Yet our school hasn’t made the playoffs in almost 10 years, and the last state championship title we had was before I was even born. We weren’t Southeast or Plains Valley High School, they had a tradition of winning. Our Varsity had barely gotten used to the taste of mediocrity. How could we look forward to sucking down spoonfuls of just-average? But then the end of that Southeast game came back to me.
Our last possession, Coach calls the trick play “Student Body Left”. It was a silly excuse of a football play that he had come up one day in practice that week. Basically it involved us all moving in front of Reese to one side of the field while Brent ran the opposite way with the ball. In practice I’d picked up that it was an easy play to take cheap shots on the defense because you could choose anyone you want to hit and just go after him as he tried to get to Reese, who they thought had the ball. Coach calls the play a couple of times and Brent manages to put one in endzone, barely, but we miss the extra point. 34-29 Southeast’s ball with 4 minutes left in my High School JV football career.
Mini-me never seemed more like his Big Brother than that last drive. Even though our secondary had dropped back and shut down his receivers, he managed to scramble for 10 yard chunks on three plays. With two minutes left they had already crossed into our side of the field. They throw a couple of short passes and hand it off for a smash mouth run up to the 20 yard-line. Spoiler, they try to pass again, but this time Mini-me doesn’t even hesitate as he takes off towards the sidelines, I couldn’t get to him even though I was on the field at the time and all of the linebackers and defensive backs had dropped back. Reese manages to save the touchdown and push Mini-me out of bounds at the five yard line. 30 seconds on the clock. Crazy as it was, they try a pass play on first down but it gets swatted. Second down, Mini-me takes the snap and runs right behind his guys for two maybe three yards. Same thing on third down, all the while I had been off the field getting a breather. With :05 seconds on the clock the refs spotted the ball at the 2-yard line.
All Mini-me had to do was either hand it off or punch it in himself. I kept thinking to myself, “Goddamn it, you worked too damn hard all off-season for this punk to take this last win from you”. I lined up on the line of scrimmage with my feet in the endzone preparing to make my final stand. For what seemed like an eternity I just stayed there, primed to maul the kid the in front of me and grapple Mini-me to the ground. Finally, he takes the hand-off and I lunge straight at his blockers, I see him get repelled but make some acrobatic moves in the backfield. By this point I was on the ground with two Southeast guys on me but they hadn’t pushed me back into the endzone. For the longest second, I thought we’d lost. But we didn’t. Mini-me got sacked in the backfield and the refs called the game. I cried that night. On that field, in front of my friends. We had gone 3-5, by football standards, below mediocrity. Varsity was aching to get their playoff dreams crushed by Southeast tomorrow. But for that night, I was content with being Average Joe.