High school football is back none too soon for the athletes
In Texas, Austin Westlake won the 6A Division I championship over Southlake Carroll.
In Arizona, Chandler took the open title over Hamilton.
In Georgia, high schools played 85% of their games in the fall of
2020, and
Marist, Sean McVay’s alma mater, beat Jefferson for the 4A trophy.
At Sierra Canyon, Jon Ellinghouse’s Friday nights were dark.
“I wasn’t doing what I love,” Ellinghouse said Thursday. “I was watching others do what I love.”
The Trailblazers finally get to do it tonight, at St. John Bosco, a stellar opener in any state.
Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, they play a sixgame schedule. Over the past 12 months, they have practiced in all but five weeks, mostly without a date to circle, or an opponent to scout.
Fringe candidates for college scholarships have gone ignored. The locker room, where the stories are told and the relationships forged, is still empty. Some of the Trailblazers practiced early in the morning, some late in the afternoon. Even now, a few of them tell Ellinghouse they don’t know the other brothers in their band.
March 12 was too late. But Ellinghouse says, with a shudder, that it is none too soon.
“I’m glad it didn’t go any further,” he said. “The guys are hanging on. Some of my rocks, the toughest kids, have really been screwed up by this. There is a mental toll that’s very real. At first they were like walking mummies. I think we’re getting them back to
normal, but any more time off and it would have been scary.
“We were promised a season in the fall, then later, then a January start. The guys start to believe there’s no chance. Some of them have turned off that switch. Now they’re realizing it’s real.”
It gets no more real than St. John Bosco. But Ellinghouse has coached Sierra Canyon to two state championships and four Southern Section titles. Paraclete is the only Gold Coast League team that will play the Trailblazers, so this particular scramble for a schedule wasn’t out of the ordinary for Ellinghouse. It also provides a smoother ramp for next year’s move to the Mission League.
Six Sierra Canyon players have full rides for next year. Only one, quarterback Chayden Peery, left early to start his college career at Georgia Tech. Cornerback/ running back D.J. Harvey, headed to Virginia Tech, is the most famous. He did not budge, and only one other Trailblazer, a freshman, moved to another state that had weighed the risks and found it more damaging not to play.
“D.J. has brought the energy every day,” Ellinghouse said. “He’s shown that he’s playing because he loves the game. It’s reinvigorating for me to coach him.”
But others have been marooned, at least temporarily. Ellinghouse mentions linebacker Cole Bullock, receiver Donovan Williams, running back Anthony Spearman, defensive end/tight end Jake Hixon, tight end Henry Deakins, defensive tackle Dominic Deberry, center/ guard Gavin Quiroz, and two-way interior lineman Jason Gilmore. They’re the ones who needed evaluation time and didn’t get it.
“Usually the colleges look hard at the first six, seven games of your senior year,” Ellinghouse said. “A couple of guys switched positions to put themselves on the map. Maybe they were playing behind somebody the previous year. They needed some senior tape.
“The other big factor was the lack of spring camp, where you might have 25 to 30 coaches out here looking at kids, and then the summer camps at the college themselves. Even more than missing a season, that’s a huge, huge part of recruiting. And then the coaches were able to see the guys who were playing in other states. It affected our guys very adversely.”
There is a five-page memo of do’s and don’t’s all coaches had to follow, just to practice. But good practices aren’t so unforgivingly scripted. There’s laughter and there’s byplay. There’s 17-year-olds knowing when to act their age and when not to.
“Normally we have sleepovers,” Ellinghouse said. “We have team-bonding exercises. We travel, have passing-league games.
We’ve had none of that. I spent more time ensuring we were meeting the guidelines instead of coming up with tricks, stuff to have fun, but then how could we have done that? We still had to be distanced. It’s tough not to have a way to build that camaraderie.”
Instead, 2021 brings two seasons. The second one should prosper from the brevity of the first.
It would be naive to think this is the final pandemic. It would be folly, next time, for California to be among the last places in America to figure out what’s possible. That is why they have lights.