At John Burch Park the JV football team was playing against Kasson Mantorville, they are one of the best teams in our conference and we lose to them almost every year. I thought to myself “man they have some big dudes” and I soon realized that most of their team consisted of mostly sophomores and a few freshmen and our team was the complete opposite and we had mostly freshmen with only a few sophomores. But that didn’t stop me from getting hyped and excited even though the chances of us winning are slim.
During the pregame warmups, I thought of a quote that my coach said to me before the game.” They might be bigger, stronger, and faster but if you drive low and give it 100$ they will move”. And I had that running through my brain the entire warm up until it was finally game time. We broke the huddle and were intimidated by their lineman, but they were aggressive at first and stopped us on our first few drives. But after we got a quick holler from our coach we stepped it up and said: “we can win this game, they get gassed faster than we are and we need to use this to our advantage”.
Next, we get on the line and we just keep wearing out their defense and eventually, a hole opens up and we break one for a touchdown. We celebrate but we know there is a lot of game left to play, so we have to stay in the same mindset as the last drive. They score, and we knew that our defense needed to step up and our offense needs to do what we did the last time. Then I thought of what my dad said earlier, and I used it as “fuel” for when I went out on the field.
Now it was our turn to show what our offense can do, we run a play called 40. It is a run up the middle but it has a lot of moving parts to it, so we run it and we break another huge run for a touchdown for 50 yards. But bad news struck Riley the running back who just scored goes to the sideline and throws up so he is out of the remainder of the game. That was a huge kick in the shin because he was a good running back and he was out for the rest of the game.
Now it was nearing the end of the game and we were down by two touchdowns and we were approaching the line and doing the same play as before and I knew the only way to score was for me to absolutely bully the guy in front of me and make sure he is out of the play. I snap the ball, and I hit the guy in the stomach area and kept driving my feet and the guy lost his balance and fell over and we scored. I ran to the sidelines and my friends said nice pancake, but the game was over and we lost by one touchdown.