I decided to play football my freshman year. I knew NOTHING about football. I don't remember what drove me to play football except that my best friend at the time was going to play. It seems very odd that I would just all of a sudden decide to join the football team - but that's what happened. The reason why I decided to play football may be related to why I suddenly decided to try out for a musical several years later. I don't know.
I basically had to learn the rules of football. During the initial team meeting, the freshman football coach started calling out peoples names and asking what position they were intending to play. When he got to my name I said, "um, I don't know" and so I ended up with the running backs. During practice I really didn't know what the running backs were doing. They were running over some kind of long, striped piece of heavy material. Looking back, I know they were running through the hole that they play was designed to create, but I was pretty clueless back then. From there, somehow I ended up as a lineman, I'm still not sure how that happened, but that's where I stayed.
I barely even knew how good Blue Ridge football teams were, but know it or not, I was joining one of the best football programs in the history of Arizona.
The younger, freshman and JV teams didn't win quite as many games as the Varsity. Freshman teams typically didn't win every single game, and there hadn't been an undefeated freshman team in a very long time. We won our first game, and then our second game, and when we reached our 10th win, we realized we had gone undefeated. I started the season knowing nothing about football, and I was actually getting some playing time and I even made a nice tackle or two.
Paul Moro was one of the main factors behind the success of the football program. He started coaching at Blue Ridge in 1984 - three years before I was born. He said
"I needed to win one state championship because I never won one in high school. I was hoping God would let me win just one before I got out of coaching." In 1987 he was discouraged with coaching because his team had struggle for the past few years. His wife encouraged him to stick with it and his team won the state championship that same year.
14 years later when I decided to join the ranks of Blue Ridge football, Coach Moro had led 10 additional teams to state championships. From 1994 to 1998, the team completely dominated with a 64 game win streak which finally ended in the 1998 state championship game. They went to the state championship game in 1999 but lost again. They went to the state championship game in 2000 but won this time, and won the title again in 2001.
Anything less than winning a championship was a failure and a bitter disappointment. That was the culture I somewhat unknowingly became a part of. It was a culture that was
accustomed to winning.
You can see that the Blue Ridge motto, "Tradition of Champions", painted on the wall of their humble football stadium amidst
the mountain pines. Below that are the years the teams won championships. The list has grown long and it looks like they will run out of room if they keep the same pace.
In 2002, the year I joined as a freshman football player, something happened that was actually pretty shocking. Blue Ridge was embarrassed in front of a homecoming crowd in their first regular season loss in perhaps a decade. That was the only game they lost that season, but there were a couple too-close-for-comfort games where the team scored the winning touchdown in the nick of time. In the postseason playoffs, they lost the quarterfinal game to Winslow - the same team they lost to earlier in the season.
I was not on the varsity team, but was at the game as a member of the marching band. After the game, I was gathered together with the rest of the band outside the field near where the defeated football team jogged off the field to their lockers. Someone in the football team screamed the F-word at the top of their lungs.
The varsity team was heartbroken after losing all of two game that season, but we as the freshman team felt pretty good about ourselves for not losing any games. I wanted to play football again the next year and I was about to see what Blue Ridge football was really like.
As soon the school season was over and the summer hit, I started attending something called "speed training", which was open to everyone who wanted to physically condition themselves, which included the football team. The football team didn't just go for the regular morning session, we showed up a couple hours early every morning so that we could either:
1) Run up and down hills until we puked (trust me, we threw up a lot, at least for the first few months)
2) Pushed cars around the parking lot, with somebody in the drivers seat pushing the brakes the entire time
3) Walked back and forth the football field with a telephone pole(!) on our shoulders, pushing it above our heads, and resting it on the other shoulder, pushing it above our heads, etc. To rest from that ordeal, we would sit down and do sit ups with the telephone pole on our chests.
After we thoroughly got our butts kicked every morning, we would have speed training which really wasn't that difficult in comparison. At least we usually remained puke free.
In the middle of the summer, we experienced Mountain Camp. We camped out in the forest for several days and did up-downs on the dirt floor and ran sprints up hills (we only puked occasionally at this point), and whatever punishments the coaches could dream up.
Mountain camp was just a teaser for the words that were spoken with reverence and fear: California Camp. Football players who had attended in years past affectionately referred to it as "Hell Week".
