Paradise finds healing on the football field
PARADISE – “I’ve got a little ... flake in my eye.”
The scruffy bear of a man pulls his sunglasses tight so his football team can’t see his tears.
Andy Hopper, an assistant football coach at Paradise High, has a story to tell. On this August morning in a cluttered school gym, he is telling it to a group of 37 boys wearing baggy shorts and weary smiles.
They are the Paradise Bobcats, teenagers who have stubbornly returned to the mountain to sift through the ashes in search of a football season.
Nine months after the most destructive wildfire in California history turned their town into scorched metal and dust, they are embarking on training camp for an autumn that is as much about healing as winning. They are charged with the rebirth not only of football, but community. Their childhood sport has become a sacred mission and one of the biggest challenges of their young lives.
One month from their first game and three days before their first padded practice, they have gathered to listen to the heartbeat of Coach Hopper.
“Nov. 8 was hard!” he says, and the gym goes silent. “You lose everything; you think it’s the end of the world!”
Sprawled across on the hardwood floor, fidgeting just moments earlier, the boys are motionless. They stare at the coach as a trickle leaks from behind those glasses.
“Nov. 13, I got the first opportunity to sneak in,” he says. “I went to look for my grandma’s ashes. I didn’t find them. I keep sifting through that, and you start feeling sorry for yourself and you
start thinking nothing is going to be right again.” As the coach speaks, he is being watched closely by the defensive back who was cornered by the fire before driving himself through hell to safety. And the running back whose mother told him they were going to die in the flames. And the other running back who ran from the blaze carrying only his equipment bag.
“Everything you find ... you pick it up, it just crumbles, right?” Hopper says, recalling how he sifted through his destroyed home. “All that stuff that you’re trying to find, it just crumbled. And you start thinking, ‘Woe is me, it’s never going to be right, it’s never going to be the same,’ and I gave up. I couldn’t find a darn thing.”
Standing behind him are coaches who lost everything and didn’t have insurance; coaches who have recently lived in half a dozen houses; a coach who lost not only his home but his business; and the fatherly head coach who was going to retire after the season but couldn’t leave his team like this.
“I got pissed off, I threw the freaking netting up, I saw something fly through the air,” Hopper says of the culmination of his search. “And I looked over. And it was this.” He pulls a small black object out of his pocket and the boys gasp. It is a Paradise football championship ring from 2011. It is badly burned and barely recognizable, but its message is clear.
The ring survived. The victory survives. Paradise football will survive. It must.
“We don’t feel sorry for ourselves. There ain’t one damn victim in here!” Hopper roars. “I feel like God chose us. I’m not saying God created that fire; I’m saying God chose us to say, ‘You know what, I’m going to make these guys the smartest dudes on Earth, that they can go through something so horrible and come out the other end and represent to the rest of the world what a man can do.’”
He is shouting, and the Paradise Bobcats are shouting back, fully ready to unleash their pain and fear and fight on the football world.
“You guys want do that this year?” “Yes coach!” “You guys want to do that this year?” “Yes coach!” Somewhere in the night, a helmet bangs. Shoulder pads crunch. A shadowy figure carries the ball into the blackness. A whistle blows. A murky huddle forms.
It figures that the Paradise High football team would begin its comeback in the dark, literally, ending recent summer practices at ancient Om Wraith Field without ever turning on the lights. “It’s dark?” The guy with the keys to those lights, defensive coordinator and school landscaper Paul Orlando, says this as if he hadn’t noticed. The players can barely be seen but can somehow see one another, and they run plays crisply through the gloaming without a stumble. The action embodies the enduring consistency of 20 years of Paradise football under coach Rick Prinz, whose system is run by the children in this football-loving community from the time they are old enough to strap on a helmet. Tradition means even more this year, the players relying on one another in the wake of the devastating Nov. 8 Camp fire that vaporized their town and caused 86 fatalities.
“You have to understand, we’ve all run these plays since we were 10 years old . ... We could do it with our eyes closed,” says running back Lukas Hartley. “Nobody notices that it’s dark. Even though we’re not in our houses that burned up, we all feel like we’re home.”
The state of this football team was chronicled in an article published June 1 by the Los Angeles Times. The players have told harrowing tales of their escapes. They have described the pain of losing possessions, the uncertainty of temporary housing and the frustration of having a potential championship season abruptly end.
When they first gathered in the spring to begin the team rebuilding process, half the players were missing, as was a key piece of equipment. They didn’t have a football.
Now, with Friday’s season opener approaching, they are in the final stages of bracing for a difficult fight. Only three players actually reside in Paradise, whose population has dipped from 26,800 to around 2,000. Virtually the entire team commutes, some as long as an hour each way. They lost their league affiliation because of the enrollment dip, and they are playing a makeshift schedule against some schools twice their size.
But a few key players have returned from temporary housing in distant cities. New equipment has been purchased with insurance money and donations. The campus miraculously survived the fire, and stone bleachers that line one side of the home field will be ready when the Bobcats walk through the stands to their traditional pregame song, Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.”