Ask Lionel Chapman how much he loves football, and the Harry S. Truman senior has an immediate response.
“With all my heart,” he said. “I have been playing it since I was a peewee. I don’t know nothing else. I don’t play any other sports.
“I probably should, but during the offseason for football, I’m working to get better at football. I can’t focus on another sport. Football is my one love.”
For a while, it looked as though Chapman might have his ‘one love’ taken away.
Things began to unravel for Truman’s football program the Monday before its first game when just 16 players showed up for practice.
“That’s the day I actually thought they were going to stop the season,” Chapman said. “We were doing three-a-days, and we had to cancel practice.
“Me, the athletic director, the other seniors and the head coach at the time had a big conversation about what we could do to save the program.
“At that time, anger was the only emotion I could say I felt. I felt mad at the world. It was nobody else’s fault, but I couldn’t believe it was actually happening. If you go to any high school, the first thing you think about is the football team, and for us not to have one, that was a big thing for me.”
One day later, the program took another hit when coach John Iannucci resigned, and athletic director George Collins announced that the administration would determine on a week-to-week basis whether to continue on with the season.“It was like one hardship after another,” Chapman said.
For the seniors who had invested their blood, sweat and tears preparing for their final high school season, it was a heartbreaking development.
“They were talking about how the season might be cancelled, and it really hit me emotionally – I’m not going to have a senior season,” Quinton Bryant said. “I cried. It really hit me. I love the sport that much.”
The final chapter to Truman’s 2010 season has not been written yet, but the story took a decidedly happy twist last Friday night when the Tigers – now 24 strong and playing under interim coach Ed Cubbage – got a much needed shot in the arm when they defeated Ben Franklin 20-12 in a non-league game in front of their home crowd.
“It was great,” Cubbage said. “I’ve coached 15 years now – I also coached basketball as well as baseball, and that win is right up there as one of my all-time favorites just because it put kind of a cap on everything of the previous week and a half.
“It wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t matter. We needed to feel good. My boys needed to feel good, and that’s what we got.”
According to the players, Cubbage, an assistant under Iannucci, has breathed new life into the struggling program.
“It’s a new attitude, a new way of coaching,” Chapman said. “I know he’s been our assistant coach for a while, and we should be used to him, but when he came in and took the job over, it was like a new person.
“He had more excitement for the job. He gave us a positive attitude, and we gave one back. It was a win-win situation right there.”
“When he first came in, things were kind of down with the coaches leaving,” Bryant added. “He picked us up, he helped us a lot.
“I believe in him, I trust him. He’s just a good coach, and it is a breath of fresh air.”
That’s not to say everything has been smooth sailing since Cubbage came on board. The team had to immediately address the matter of dwindling numbers, and they made the decision to not allow the upperclassmen who had quit the team to come back.
“It was a hard decision, but we took into consideration the people on our team that were there from the beginning,” Bryant said. “If we did let other people on the team, it wasn’t fair to them because those people weren’t there during three-a-days in the hot summer, lifting and all of that.“I feel it should be the people that were there and stuck with each other and trusted each other. They had our backs in the beginning, and you know they’ll have our backs at the end.”
“We felt like they let us down before, and they’ll do it again,” Chapman agreed. “All those people that quit – it’s not like they’re going to do us any good.
“Yeah, we do need the numbers, but who knows if they’re going to play their hardest out on the field like the people who went through the three-a-days.”
Cubbage chose to honor the wishes of the seniors.
“It’s a big testament to their character,” he said. “I’ve let some ninth and 10th graders come out for the program, but I said no to the juniors and seniors.
“This is our team, and we’re going forward. The reason I let the ninth and 10th graders out was they’re still kids we can develop. None of them will make an impact on our team this year. Our impact players are our varsity guys, and they want it that way.
“In all honesty, it might wind up hurting us because who knows if we have a game where we get roughed up, but for right now, we’re going forward, and we’re pretty excited about it too. We have 11 seniors. They’re our boys, they’re our leaders.”
And those leaders share a passion for football as well as a commitment to each other.
“We’re a family, we’re brothers, we’re a team,” Bryant said. “This makes you realize what’s important to you. At any time, we could have given up on each other, but we realized we only have those people so we have to give all we got, be the best we can be for each other.
“This whole family thing – that’s what we preach because that’s what it is. It’s all we have. If you circle around family, good things will happen because a family is the closest thing you can get. If you have a family, you know things will go good whether you won the game or lost. Those are the people that fought with you to the end, they didn’t give up on you – they’re still there with you.”
The Tigers dropped their season opener to Cheltenham but rebounded for the win over Ben Franklin.
“It was a phenomenal feeling,” Bryant said. “It helped us a lot because with that win, it made us think, ‘Yeah, we can do this now.’
“Everyone was happy, everyone came out on the field. It was a wonderful thing after all the drama that happened – for us to overcome that and get a victory, it was a great feeling.”
Upper Dublin is waiting in the wings on Thursday night, but according to Cubbage, win or lose, these young men have shown their true character.
“It’s been a huge wave of emotions from the bottom to the top,” the Tigers’ coach said. “Our kids were at first down in the dumps because they didn’t understand why everything was happening, but we went forward as a football team.
“Football players learn how to do that – you fall down, you get back up, and you go play again, and that’s kind of what we did. We were down in the dumps, and we got ourselves back up.”
And they did it together – 24 strong led by a group of seniors whose love for the game kept the 2010 season very much alive.
“We have to win games to keep our season going,” Chapman said. “Me and my senior class – we don’t want to leave Truman like the other senior classes. We want to win and have something to show for it.
“If we leave with a winning record, we started something, and hopefully next year’s team will start something else and make it to the playoffs and we’ll keep building from there.”
Whatever the future holds, this year’s senior class leaves behind a special legacy all its own.
“The main thing is that it’s us – the 24 people out there and the coaches that stuck with us, and it’s all about family,” Bryant said. “I love my team to death.
“I would go all out for every last one of them because I know they have my back too because they’ve been there, and they’re still there with me.”
- Log in to post comments
0
