By Charlie Schwartz
The air was cold, same as all the other games before it, but this one was much different. The implications of the championship game ahead of us was like a ton of bricks weighing on our pads as we stoically click clacked our way down onto the battlefield. Everyone was coping with the game in their own way, some quiet, others talkative and trying to relax before the hellfire that was to come.
Playing football at Aptos High School is more than a simple commitment, if one decides to play for Aptos Football a player must be determined, respectful, tough-skinned, and most important of all selfless. Most spectators who attend our games only see a small part of what goes into making an Aptos High football player.
The people who only come to the games do not see us in the weight-room every morning at 6:30, they don’t see our never-ending practices that are, in most cases, more mentally and physically demanding than the games themselves. Don’t get me wrong, it is an absolute honor and a privilege to have the support at the games that we have had, but that alone cannot give a complete picture as to the character and work ethic of an Aptos player.
We all lived for those Friday nights. The crowd, the lights (In the Harbor game – the lack thereof), the clacking of cleats as we walk down to the field, touching “the Rock”, every little nuance matters, and we love every second of it.
The game begins and everybody is already beginning to settle into what we do best, play the game of football. We started out slow, but the defense kept us afloat, Dante Gomez with a key blocked field goal to save us 3 points. The sideline erupts and begins to jump in a moment of pure happiness. End of the half, Saint Ignatius 0, Aptos 0.
Sitting in the locker-room at Westmont High school at the half of one of, if not the most, important football games of our 4-year high school career, it dawned on me, as I’m sure it did on the other seniors, that this could be our last half of football, the last time we would walk down onto a football field as Aptos football players — the last time we would run through our tunnel. It all felt surreal that 4 years of day-in and day-out workouts, practices and games could go by that fast. And before we could blink … it was over.
We won the game by a field goal and the next thing we knew we were kneeling down, family, friends, and coaches all around us congratulating our team for working so hard and overcoming many difficult obstacles that would cripple any other team, but not ours. We fought to the bitter end, and we came out as Champions yet again.
And it wasn’t any one player or any single coach who led us to success, but it was every single one of us from the scout offense (“Bad Company”) to the scout defense (“Scurvy Dogs”), every single player contributed whether they played the entire game, for just 3 plays, or didn’t play at all; every single person helps in some way or they would have quit long before.
The feeling of winning the last football game after four years of countless hours of work was a feeling of true, unfiltered, unadulterated joy. Nobody can ever take that away from us. We won that game and we deserved every bit of it.
Words cannot express the profound respect that I have for all of my teammates and coaches. You’ll just have to come to a game and witness it for yourself in the 2015 season.