Another Round at the Say When: Going from Football Coach to Groundskeeper
A journalist moves to the small town of McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada line, to learn about why the high school football team never wins, and about the townsfolk who cheer them on.
One in a series.
Coach Richard Egan walks across the green grass of a rural high-school football field, painting on the white lines and hash marks that will guide young athletes this season.
They just won't be his kids.
Two days before, the McDermitt Bulldogs were forced to cancel their entire eight-man football season.
That means Egan, the proud veteran coach of the eight-man McDermitt Bulldogs, has surrendered his role for this season.
Today, he is back to his regular day job as school groundskeeper, lining a field, not for his varsity team, but for a junior high school league.
Poof. Just like that. His autumn has been stolen.
Out here on the Nevada-Oregon line, the spell of a sports wizard seems to be cruelly at work.
The team forfeited all four games Egan and his kids really wanted to play.
There just aren't enough bodies.
They have seven boys and need eight.
They all know this is the price of living in a small town of only a few hundred souls, where the economy has wilted and people are moving away.
And taking their kids with them.
Without players, football seasons, like waterless crops, die on the vine.
With the season officially over, the boys all went home, consoled by their parents there was nothing left to do. In a few weeks, the core of the football team will begin practicing for the upcoming basketball season.
These same kids, wearing different uniforms, playing a different sport.
Small-town boys continuing to make memories.
But here's the trouble with high school sports.
They can break a boy’s heart, and they can also break a town’s, too.
Nobody can recall the last time the football Bulldogs won a game. Was it 2016 or 2017? Who can remember?
And now there's not even a team to be had.
So folks just go about their lives. And weekends in the fall are just a little less special.
“I don’t even go to the football field anymore,” says one Bulldog alumnus who ran for touchdowns here a half a century ago. “I don’t even recognize those kids.”
Adds another longtime resident: “Rooting for a team is easier when they’re winning. It has everything to do with pride. You say, ‘This is my town. This is my team.’ But it’s harder to say when they’re losing. And when they don't even field a team, well ..."
They aren’t the only ones.
Recently, football in this town broke a high school coach’s heart as well.
On this cool Thursday morning, wind gusts blow in with the distinct scent of fall.
Richard Egan has a job to do.
He wears a long-sleeved shirt, camouflage vest and gloves against the chill. He walks back and forth across the grass, working with a small crew to paint the lines on the school football field.
As high school playing fields go, this one is a simple, underfunded and isolated place out among the sagebrush and dirt roads. Unlike at other, wealthier schools, in towns with booming economies, there is no artificial turf in McDermitt, no pro-level wight rooms, no posh buses to whisk the team to away games.
In McDermit, there's a single set of bleachers for the home crowd and visitors to share.
But on weeknights and weekends, this place still bustles with energy. Scores of Little Leaguers, the after-school club of boys and girls, kindergarten through eighth grade, play here.
For them, fall still means football. They have a slate of games, beginning in two days. And Richard Egan the coach knows that many of these kids will be tomorrow's players on his varsity team
So Egan the groundskeeper does his job, walking back and forth, painting those white lines.
All year round, he collects his main paycheck as the school's groundskeeper. The fall football season is extra, something sweet to look forward to every year, as he lies in bed at night, dreaming up new plays.
He played here as a high-schooler, scoring touchdowns for the 1982 team that won its division’s statewide championship.
Those were days when McDermitt had its mine and a palpitating heartbeat, a bustling town that could produce 30 high school football prospects come fall.
But those days are gone, no matter how much Egan wants them back.
For nearly a decade now, Coach Egan has relived those glory years.
Each season, he sizes up the new freshman, placing them among his collection of players, considering the value of the individual, how he improves the whole, like a boy might wield his playing cards.
And every year, as groundskeeper, he obsesses over that football field like a finicky suburban homeowner. He takes pride in its lushness and greenness, and mourns the dead spots that bedevil his precious grass each fall.
There’s that cruel magician at work again.
There's no shame in being a groundskeeper, especially if you're a coach at heart.
So on this morning, just days after learning that his own team was not to be, Egan pushes a gas-powered machine that sprays white paint onto the green grass. His helpers stretch a string across the belly of the field so the white lines are strait and true.
The machine does not belong to McDermitt, but to another school, 75 miles away in Winnemucca. The one Egan bought the previous year had sputtered and failed, like his dream of coaching football this season.
And so he borrows one, taking advantage of the kindness of other schools. With so few kids and an undersized budget, the football Bulldogs have for years relied on hand-me-down uniforms and equipment.
The sporting accoutrements that some other school, some other boys, no longer needed.
But this old football player stays proud.
One year, without a machine to paint the white lines on his coveted field, Egan did it himself.
He used so many hand-held spray cans, the kind that rattle when you shake them.
He got on his hands and knees and painted those lines the only way he could.
The wind whips as Sheldon Burgenheier watches Egan walk along the grass behind his machine.
He's like a man mowing his lawn.
Burgenheier is the groundskeeper at Lowry High School in Winnemucca, and has brought along both the device and a team to help Egan at his task.
He doesn't know that McDermitt’s varsity football season has been cancelled, that this coach-turned-groundskeeper is doing this job for other players, not his own.
But the news doesn't surprise him.
“My boy has seen what is happening up here,” Burgenheier says. “One day, he asked me, ‘How much longer is McDermitt even going to have a high school?’”
It's a good question.
So the teen's father imparted a bit of unvarnished rural wisdom about small-town survival.
“Unless you have enough young couples who want raise a family, you won’t have any kids in a place like that,” he told the boy. “You’ll just have a bunch of old-timers.”
As he works, Egan is a large man of Shoshone-Paiute heritage, a hulking figure with lineman-sized shoulders, and few words.
Still, he is happy with his results on this morning.
But only as a man who works the earth, rather than guiding the boys who play on top of it.
The other day, as coach, there were tears in his eyes.
Today, as groundskeeper, there is a soft grunt of satisfaction.
Out on the track that rings the field, Egan’s assistant football coach, Jack Smith, power-walks with his first-period strength and fitness class.
He watches Egan at work and shakes his head.
“That stings,” he says. "It’s pretty sad.”
Soon, the men are done with their work and they turn off the machine.
The isolated patch of grass, which sits north across the Oregon line from the high school, whose official address is in Nevada, now looks like a legitimate football field.
Now the games can be played here.
Players will run, hit hard, catch passes, commit fumbles, score touchdowns.
They just will not be Coach Richard Egan’s kids.
Not this season, but maybe next.