Everyone can make a judgment. Everyone can create or add on to a rumor. Everyone can look at our team’s record or the scores. Everyone can think we suck. Everyone can lose faith in our team when things get rough. Everyone can make all the jokes they want about our team and the outcomes of the past season.
But no one outside of our program, the locker rooms, the huddles and practices will ever understand what we experienced this past season. If anyone on the team were to be asked to predict what they thought would happen this season, I can guarantee that none of us anticipated anything like this.
Everything leading up to the official start to the season seemed normal, from the loud and intense lifting sessions to the lengthy summer practices in the heat. Everything seemed normal.
Yes, I had to sacrifice large amounts of time this summer that could have been spent at the beach or with friends, but that was simply the commitment that comes with playing football. Despite losing a majority of my summer, I endured it all and was able to coordinate my schedule around football to make the best season of all.
My teammates and I never knew what was going on behind the scenes, in the coaches’ meetings, off the field and away from the lights. Like me, my teammates had to make the best of their summers while working around football.
Everything had become normal to us, it was all we had known in terms of what high school football was like. We would spend hours on end working on plays, doing drills and everything one could imagine.
When the events of week four, against Rahway, hit and everything began to unfold, I just remember my head spinning as I tried to piece together what was happening. It was challenging to tell my parents about what was going on and how uncertain we were about the future of our program.
Despite all of the losses we faced this year, both on and off the field, Coach Swercheck always made sure that our spirits were high and that we were focused on football. He stepped up tremendously; he continued to motivate us and believe in us, even when we didn’t believe in ourselves.
I want to thank Coach Swercheck, Coach Izu and Coach Fletcher for guiding our program through this year and helping us remain focused on playing football. They have truly been able to make us better football players and better people.
I have never been so connected and appreciative of a team I participated on than this year’s football team. We bonded and built such strong connections through the before and after school lifting sessions, summer practices, seven on sevens, team dinners and everything in between. This was no longer just a team for most of us us, and the coaches became a family through dealing with all of the adversity that came with the 2023-2024 season.
