Roadrunners hope to avoid injury bug that canceled season
Six-man team schedules two out-of-state contests as it rebuilds program
If you ask the New Mexico School for the Deaf Roadrunners, they didn’t want the 2016 season to end before it began.
It was not yet a day after the Roadrunners finished their 6-man football scrimmage against the Vaughn Eagles when head coach James Litchfield III faced a dilemma no coach wants to face. A couple of injuries and a few concussions left NMSD with just eight healthy players to begin the season against Animas in a couple of weeks.
As enthusiastic and determined as the rest of the team was to start and finish the season, Litchfield worried that the mountain of injuries would snowball into a vicious cycle. As one player would return healthy, another would take his place on the sidelines.
With the wide variety of experience the Roadrunners had — a few players with at least three years along with underclassmen and eighth-graders who were learning the game on the fly — Litchfield also was concerned about putting unprepared players in precarious situations on the field.
So, Litchfield decided to cancel the season.
“It was not worth the risk at that time,” Litchfield said through an interpreter. “So, we decided at that time to be a football club.”
That decision to continue working out in preparation for next year allowed the long-standing program to hit the “pause” button instead of simply walking away from the field until this August. The two months the Roadrunners spent on the field last fall was dedicated toward player development and maintaining the base of the program.
Still, the Roadrunners couldn’t hide their disappointment at their plight.
“It was just a total bummer, a total letdown,” sophomore running back/ defensive back Julio Portillo said
through an interpreter. “But we just had to accept it for what it was and focus on getting ready for this year.”
All the while, Litchfield and the Roadrunners had to practice patience.
“A lot of the kids want to play,” Litchfield said. “They want the heat of the battle, they want to play the game. Without gearing up, it is a little difficult to have full contact. We just stressed commitment. If they wanted to improve, they had to show up. We needed it from them, too, and we told them, ‘We need you for next year, but you gotta put in the time now.’ ”
It appears that the time away from the game might produce the results Litchfield and some of the veterans hoped for to help the program. Litchfield saw 14 players show up for practice, although a couple of them still need their physicals to play. On Thursday, the team still had seven healthy players to practice as a few teammates observed in street clothes tending to injuries they suffered already.
The strength in numbers, though, was an encouraging sight.
“The start of practice, me and all of my friends were super stoked,” senior quarterback/ running back/wide receiver Jonathan Garcia said. “It felt really good. This year, we have a ton more players and that is awesome.”
Portillo, though, got a little reminder of what practice can do to a body after the first day of practice two weeks ago.
“I felt super sore,” Portillo said. “It felt good to have the program back, but I was so sore. We hadn’t played football pretty much the entire summer. It was great to be back, but it came with some soreness.”
The veterans played a role in NMSD’s changing fortunes. They hit the hallways to encourage their classmates to come out and play last fall.
“We kinda just said, ‘Hey, you should play football,’ ” junior quarterback/tight end Deven Thompson said. “I think, after a while, maybe they just got tired of hearing it and joined. We got four or five players to join.”
That’s quite the haul at a school that has a little more than 40 high-school students at the K-12 campus. The football club allowed the new Roadrunners to learn some of the basics of the game and work on fundamentals. Litchfield said that has been a challenge at the school because many of them did not play the sport growing up.
NMSD had a flag football program for elementary and middle-school students, but interest waned over time. Litchfield would like see that return, but he used last fall as classroom of sorts.
“The goal of the club was to focus on the basics — blocking, throwing, passing — stuff that is really covered in the fundamentals,” Litchfield said. “There were a lot students in the elementary school and middle school who were interested, and it was a time to review the basics, to develop a better understanding of football.”
And who better to help with learning the game but his own players? Garcia, Thompson and Portillo have the most experience on the team, and they each did their part to help their classmates/teammates grow.
“You just tell people what their mistakes are and how to do things right,” Portillo said. “It’s hard, but I think it’s important to continue to learn, and be open to learning. It was an important decision to keep playing.”
The grind of practice has taken a toll on some players already, but they still have three weeks to mend before NMSD officially returns to the sport. The Roadrunners will fly to Little Rock, Ark., to take on the Arkansas School for the Deaf on Sept. 9. Then comes the first home game in almost two years when Iowa School for the Deaf comes to Santa Fe on Sept. 16.
Those two dates are the carrots Litchfield is holding in front of his team to keep them focused until then.
“I can see they are hungry for it, they want it,” Litchfield said of playing football. “That’s something different than from what I’ve seen in the past.”
Perhaps it’s the lesson of having something special taken away from them, even for a year. It’s a sour note no one at the school wants to repeat.