Just a couple of ‘Chaps’ from Westlake
High school boasts two Super Bowl MVPs in Drew Brees and Nick Foles
On the way to Westlake High School’s annual football banquet Sunday afternoon, 500 fans and players’ family members will walk down the same hallways Drew Brees and Nick Foles once walked. Around the corner are the locker rooms they dressed in, the film rooms they studied in, their old practice fields and classrooms, and their old football stadium.
When the banquet starts, guests will toast the 2018 Westlake football team, one that came within a game of a state championship appearance — and also watch two of the Chaparrals’ favourite sons duel to move on to the NFC championship game.
Brees starred at this high school football powerhouse on the west side of Austin, Texas, from 1992 to 1996, leading Westlake to a 28-0-1 record and its only state title as a two-year starter. Foles, another two-year starter, graduated in 2007, breaking a few of Brees’ records along the way and leading Westlake to another state championship appearance.
Their meeting Sunday will be the second time in their combined 25 seasons in the NFL that they’ll play against one another in the post-season; Brees’ Saints beat Foles’ Eagles in the wildcard round in 2014. It’s thought to be the third time in NFL history that quarterbacks from the same high school will play against each other in the playoffs; Terry Bradshaw and Joe Ferguson of Woodlawn High School, in Shreveport, La., faced off in 1974, while quarterbacking the Steelers and Bills. Sunday will surely be the first time two opposing playoff quarterbacks from the same high school both own Super Bowl MVPs.
And around Westlake, a school of about 2,800 students where football is a way of life and keeping track of players in college or the pros is a constant hobby, the hallways are buzzing.
As athletic director and football coach Todd Dodge hands out team awards and reminisces about Westlake’s 2018 season at the banquet, the booster club will beam the Saints and Eagles game from a projector in the background. “We’ll eat first, and then there will be about 500 Westlake football fans watching and rooting them on,” Dodge said in a phone interview.
Photos of Brees and Foles and the teams they played on hang in Westlake’s hallways. Their names used to top the school’s record books, but have been replaced in recent years by Sam Ehlinger, now the quarterback at the University of Texas and the Chaparrals’ 2015 and 2016 starter, and 2017 and 2018 starter Taylor Anderson. Ehlinger made headlines this month by wearing Brees’ high school jersey before the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, and again during his postgame news conference.
“I honestly wanted to play like him, have a little magic. I was just paying my respect to him,” Ehlinger said, while Brees called Ehlinger “a stud” in social media posts. The Saints veteran has also had kind words for Foles, who started for Westlake in 2006 when Brees’ state title team celebrated its 10-year anniversary.
“Funny how things play out,” Brees recently told reporters. “But he’s done a phenomenal job.”
Westlake quarterbacks still watch film of Brees’ mechanics and quick release. And before Foles caught a touchdown when the Eagles ran “Philly Special” in Super Bowl LII, Ehlinger scored on the same play, which is called “Money 5” in the Westlake playbook. “It’s a Westlake thing,” Ehlinger wrote on Twitter.
It all points to a quarterbacking tradition that runs deep at Westlake. Starting under centre for the Chaps, as they’re known around town, is one of the greatest honours of a student’s time in high school, Anderson and Dodge both said.