SOUTH MTN. RELISHES ITS ELUSIVE VICTORY

The players sneaked up on Phoenix South Mountain football coach Daryl Phillips from the back and began to lift the Gatorade cooler above their heads.

One of Phillips’ assistants frantically waved his arms, asking the kids to wait. The coach was shaking hands with his counterparts from Apache Junction. Dousing him in icecold Gatorade — and maybe soaking Apache Junction’s coaches in the process — wasn’t a good idea.

The players’ overexuberance was understandable. It’s not as if they could act like they had been there before. They hadn’t. South Mountain’s 26-13 victory ended a 30-game losing streak that dated to midway through the 2010 season. To be precise, South’s last win was on Oct. 22, 2010, a 29-8 victory over Phoenix Camelback.

“I’m so happy for the kids,” a shivering but ecstatic Phil- lips said. “They played their butts off. They made the community proud and they know it.”

It’s hard to imagine now, but South Mountain has a substantial football heritage. It reached the Class 5A statetitle game in 1976 and 1993, losing both games. It has sent at least seven players onto the NFL, including Byron Evans, Terry Fair and Steve Jordan.

Like many schools in the Phoenix Union High School district, however, South’s program suffered with the population shift into the suburbs and the socio-economic decline of its surrounding neighborhood. It had a momentary respite in 2007, going 10-3 under George De La Torre and then 8-3 the following year under Zane Zamenski, but by 2009 the program was underwater again.

The past three seasons have been particularly brutal. In 2011 South was outscored 347-79. In 2012 it lost eight of its 10 games by at least 30 points. The program had become an easy target, even on campus.

“You’d hear comments like, ‘You’re nothing. You’ll never win.’ There was just a lot of hate for our team,” senior center Issac Gaspar said. “It was very tough, emotionally and physically. Losing is no fun no matter who you are.”

Phillips never wavered from his plan, though. He believed in what he was doing, and he believed in his seniors. When he gathered the team after their victory, he said, “I told you that you were going to be the group that got it going in the right direction.”

“The seniors worked so hard the whole time, going through all the trials and tribulations,” Phillips said. “They’ve done the right thing, coming to the practice, coming to the weight room … that goes a long way to building the program.”

It was hard to find much progress through South Mountain’s first eight games this year. Seven of the eight losses were by at least 29 points, and South Mountain was shut out four times. Take away a 34-33 loss to Phoenix Alhambra, and South Mountain had scored a grand total of 27 points.

But Phillips knew the scores more accurately reflected the quality of opponents South Mountain played than the caliber of his team. Four of its losses came to Goodyear Desert Edge, Scottsdale Saguaro, Williams Field and Queen Creek.

“They played one of the toughest schedules we’ve seen around here in a long, long time,” Phillips said. “They kept fighting when everybody was against us, and those games helped make us tough- er.”

With less than a minute left in Friday’s game, South Mountain did something it hasn’t done in a long, long time: It lined up in victory formation and took a knee. When the clock struck zero, the players raced to the sideline to join their teammates in celebration.

“This was a huge step for us,” Phillips said. “We’re going to get it going.”

Gaspar was one of the last players off the field. He was asked what it would have been like to finish his high school career without ever winning a game.

“Just emptiness,” he said. “That’s the only way I can describe it.” And now? “It feels amazing,” he said. “It feels amazing.”