by Christopher Hivner

We were the worst of the worst. Losers of thirty in a row, 0-30 in my three-year high school football career. As I began my senior year, we had little chance of changing this pattern. The Fighting Dairymen of Wilcox High. You heard me, Dairymen. The school was founded by Stanley Wilcox, the biggest rancher in Sunnyburn County and descended from a long line of noble dairy farmers. We played teams like the Tigers, the Timberwolves, the Warriors; teams that made you think of fierceness, courage, and strength. Whereas the Wilcox Dairymen made me think of 4 a.m. and cold hands on cow teats.

The last three years had been a nightmare. Our coach was a nice man who had no idea what he was doing, and he admitted as much. Coach Janus was the near-retirement age history teacher who took the job on a temporary basis. Seven years ago. Each year the school board solicted resumes, but no one wanted the job. Who wants to coach at a tiny school in a tiny cow town with a team that barely matriculates enough players to fill the roster?

Practices started in August, two weeks before school opened. When we gathered on the field, prepared for Coach Janus's agility drills from 1957, we were met instead by a new coach. He introduced himself as Ron Stark. He looked so young, he couldn't be old enough for this job. I sneaked a peek at Oral Tasker, our center, who could grow a beard by second period if he had shaved first thing after he woke up, and thought there's no way Ron Stark could be Coach Stark, but he was.

He walked back and forth in front of us as we sat on the practice field, explaining who he was and where he had come from. He grew up in California, played college football at Stanford, and played three years in the National Football League as a third-string defensive back and special teams player.

My mouth dropped open. I hoped I didn't look as stupid as I felt, but our new coach had played in the NFL. He'd made it to the promised land. I could see golden beams of light illuminating him as he spoke. His feet didn't quite touch the ground, hovering a few inches in the air as he glided around us. The chorus of angels that I was sure followed him wherever he went was just starting up when the coach fell silent. His gaze, steel girders emanating from his eye sockets, was locked on Specter. James Harlow Timmerman the third, better known as Specter because he was tall and cadaverously thin, with sallow, sunken skin and a thatch of black hair somewhere on his head (it never seemed to be in the same place twice).

Specter had laughed because Coach Stark was not a star in the NFL, but only a special teams player. The chortle caught in his throat when he realized Coach had heard him and eventually got lost in his lungs as he ran laps around the field for a half an hour. The lesson continued the next day as we were shown how strong and fast you have to be just to make an NFL roster for a few years. We all decided that if Coach Stark was only good enough for third-string, the superstars must have been torn from the thigh of Zeus. (I took Mythology as a sophomore, some of it stuck. Who knew?)

Over the next few weeks I felt something I hadn't experienced in three years as a Wilcox High football player: confidence. Besides updating our playbook and techniques, our new coach inspired us. The first part of every practice was spent sitting and listening, a lecture on what it took to be a real football player. Perseverance, effort, teamwork, excitement, desire. Finding the soft part of the zone, reading the blitzes on a third and long when it's late in the game and you're deep in your own territory, when the other team has just been killing you all night with pressure on your quarterback (who's limping and has a bad shoulder as it is, and wonders why the referee refuses to call the defensive end for the illegal move he keeps doing).

The lecture I remember the most was the one about "creating a legacy for the school." Coach told the seniors that there wasn't much he could do for us besides win a few games in our last year. No one could erase the thirty straight losses, but we could change the future for the freshmen. Football wasn't just a team sport for the time you were playing it, he told us. We would always be a part of Wilcox High School football. No matter how old we were or where life took us, we would always be the Fighting Dairymen. Our stories would be swapped with other generations like kids trading baseball cards.

Coach Stark had us close our eyes and remember when we were in sixth or seventh grade, and we'd sit in the stands with our parents watching the games, dreaming about when it would be our turn to be out on that field in the red and white jerseys. We never thought about the losing; we just wanted to play. Then he told us to imagine ourselves on the field during our first game this year. A fresh batch of young faces watching us, dreaming in fire engine red and mud-caked white. We could change things for the future. And we could do it while running around like the barbarian horde sacking Rome.

The day of our first game, I was strangely calm. I really believed we could win. The coach had us so wired the teachers were complaining because none of us could sit still in class. During last period study hall, I sat in the library, closing my eyes to visualize each play I was going to make in a few hours. I couldn't help but think back to last year before our first game.

We were going to play West Manchester, the best team in our league. I sat in English class thinking about the game. I wanted to win so badly, and I knew we were going to lose. But not just lose, we were going to get massacred. The teacher busily wrote notes on the board and chattered on about her love for Chaucer while I stared straight ahead and saw only West Manchester players scoring again and again, just like the year before. I heard their inevitable laughter rolling around inside my head, and suddenly I didn't want to play that night. Then I started to cry. Right in the middle of class, the tears streamed down my face, and my body shook. I came out of my reverie enough to know everyone was staring at me, and Miss Peel wanted to know what was wrong, but I couldn't stop.