Around the locker room, you could sense that the players knew they didn't play well and everybody expected the next week of practice to be tough. I am sure that they were all expecting coach Propst to light into him, but all things considered, I think he handled things pretty well. I am sure he was going to work them as hard as they have ever worked, but for the most part it looked like he was not going to resort some of the things he promised to do after their last loss, like refusing to talk to any college recruiters, making it more difficult for any of them to be able to play in college. Alex mentioned that the next week was going to be a reality check for most of them to see how well they could handle the stress mentally and physically.

Would there be anybody to step up as a leader for Hoover? That's what Coach Pabst wants to know as he pulls the team in for a meeting. He asks them to think about how they played, and if they thought they played with desire and passion to raise their hands. The first one to raise his hand was Cornelius, and coach Pabst agreed. The second one to say that he played hard was Bryan Morgan, the big offensive tackle that is just as happy belting out show tunes as he is knocking over linebackers. OK, so that's two and, well, if you are playing a game that requires at least 11 people on the field at once, shouldn't you have more than two people who played hard? Well, I guess now we know why Hoover was having so many problems. Propst worked the kids pretty hard, but a lot of what he needed to see from his players was not going to come out of his mouth.

The biggest problem with Hoover's team, at least according to Pabst, is leadership. Many of the kids on the team had never experienced a loss, so they literally didn't know what to do after a game like this. As for the ones who might remember a loss, they were able to lean on older players last time. Now they are those older players, and some of the kids are looking up to them. The coaches wonder where the leadership is going to come from, and some of the players wonder as well. Alex is playing cards with Goose and another player we haven't met yet named Cory. Alex said that the players are better this year, but last year everybody seemed to be doing all of the right things.

To me, this sounded like good news. Alex, a senior, was going to take some responsibility, right? Well, sort of. When he started talking about leadership, he mentioned Max. Max is a good player, but he thinks that sometimes he puts his head down and quits when things get tough, although he does concede that he is under a lot of pressure. Now, if Alex is smart enough to realize there is a problem, he should be smart enough to fix it. If you see a teammate is down, you try and pick them up. Slap on the helmet, pat him on the ass, have sex with his girlfriend. You know, do whatever it takes to fire him up a little bit. Instead, Alex is kind of passing the buck off to Max, which isn't really how most leaders do things.

One of the problems with getting kids to focus on football is that a lot of them don't like to sacrifice other parts of their life. You want to get them to focus, but not everybody is ready to make football the only thing in their lives. And once the kids start to feel like that, they will stop having fun, and when you stop having fun, the pressure of everything else can affect your performance.

With that in mind, we step back into the life of Repete for a little while as he and his girlfriend Megan go out on a date. Although Repete is one of the star defensive players on the Hoover roster, that doesn't mean that the social options in his hometown are going to suddenly expand. He's forced to make do with the options that he has, which means one of several things including, Go-Karts, Putt Putt, or the always popular "buy a ticket to the most boring movie so there are fewer people in the theater staring when you make out for 90 minutes". Repete is creative, and goes for perhaps the best option of them all: bowling!

Posted by J-Unit on September 18, 2006 3:52 PM