Another Round at the Say When: Small-Town Boys Who Lose like Men

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, no matter what.

One in a series.

As a high-school football referee in central Nevada, Alden Donston can hear the teenage chatter along the sidelines and inside the offensive huddles.

He catches the boasting and “just do your job” carping when things go wrong.

Sometimes he shakes his head at the bravado and peer pressure; these are just boys after all, getting their first taste of team play, enduring the thud of getting hit hard and having to get back up again.

That’s why, when working a game in early May between the Owyhee Braves and the McDermitt Bulldogs, he was dumbfounded to witness something that seemed to rise above the level of a mere scholastic football game, a scene that for a small group of teenagers was transformed into a hard lesson about life.

They were kids learning what it takes to lose with dignity. On that Saturday, the ref swears, he saw a bunch of boys walk through that threshold to become men.

Donston, 52, who spends his days working as a supply chain manager at the Nevada Gold Mine, had scouted the game. As part of his homework, he’d watched films of each team’s previous contest.

And he feared a mismatch of the worst kind.

“We knew Owyhee had a good team filled with older kids, juniors and seniors,” Donston recalled. “They were just tough-looking, with a 250-pound freshman in a jersey that barely fit.”

On the other side, the undersized Bulldogs had just three juniors, with the rest freshman. “You’ve got boys who’ve never played football, lined up against a senior defensive tackle who weighs a hundred pounds more.”

The film suggested it would be a very long game for the Bulldogs.

“What happens is that the bigger kid bull-rushes the smaller one, knocks him three feet into the backfield. A lot of kids just say to themselves, ‘Why do I want to do this?’”

But that’s not what happened.

Sure, the bigger kids prevailed. They knocked their smaller opponents to the ground again and again.

But those kids from McDermitt?

They got up.

And they never gave up.

Donston went home after the game and couldn’t forget about what those boys had accomplished, the maturity they’d shown in the face of a lopsided 70-2 defeat. 

So he wrote an email to Dave Jensen, the superintendent of Humboldt County Schools, because he did not want that afternoon to go unnoticed.

“My name is Alden Donston and I'm sending you this quick note to share with you my experience with the McDermitt football team this past Friday,” he began.

“I was an official for their game and all I can say is that McDermitt should be very proud of those eight boys and the way they carry themselves on the football field. Even when the scoreboard was not in their favor, they continued to complement their opponents on their play, help them up after each play and displayed a very positive no-quit attitude.”

It was, frankly, something he’d rarely, if ever, seen on a high school football field.

“In today's sports world this is something that you don't see very often and especially when you're losing,” Donston wrote. “They could have folded up the tents and gone home but they kept playing and that showed a lot of class and character. At no time during the game did I hear negative comments towards us as officials, the other team and even to each other.”

These were not your average teenagers, and he wanted to celebrate them as adults.

“I know you always hear about the kids when they're bad,” Donston closed his letter, “but sometimes you need to hear about the good also.”

There’s an age-old sports cliche that goes: It’s not about winning or losing, but how you play the game.”

In McDermitt, these boys play a man’s game.

Alden Donston knows high school football at all levels — as a player, a coach and lastly as a referee. He’s witnessed the game from every angle.

Over 35 years, his exploits landed him in the Wyoming high school Hall of Fame.

He grew up playing small-town football, not with 11 or even eight boys, but just six.

Like other kids at his school, and like the boys from McDermitt, he played all sports — football, basketball and track and field — because that’s what rural kids do.

“Small-town kids play all the sports — they have to to keep the programs going. In towns like McDermitt, the school is the hub of the community,” he said.

When the school has an event, the whole town shows up. “There’s nothing else to do,” Donston said. “No public pool. No movie theater. You’re lucky if you have a few bars or a grocery store, a place to eat, and the school.”

Like its six-man cousin, eight-man football is different from the traditional game. Donston calls it “basketball on grass,” with players up and down the field, with scores that can reach into the 100s.

In small towns, he says, there are often barely enough boys to field a team, so they play both offense and defense. Many never come off the field. 

Also, the distances traveled to away games are measured in the hundreds of miles. Some people refer to such contests as “the farmers versus the ranchers,” he says.

They should be called Road Warriors.

Because for the boys who play, this is a rare, fleeting moment in the public spotlight.

“You go to these places and everyone knows there’s a football game at 7 pm. The boys are the pride of the town. Family and friends watch them play. The stands at games at bigger schools can be a graveyard sometimes, but not here,” Donston says.

It’s a tradition that needs to be preserved.

“Take that team out of a McDermitt or a Carlin, and the town would lose that history. It would destroy the soul of that town. People would lose their game day.”

And those young players?

“They’re not usually playing for the league championship or even a chance at a scholarship. They practice two hours every night, and this is their prize after all that hard work,” he said.

“When those kids in McDermitt strap on a helmet, they're living out a boyhood dream.”

That day on the football field, the Owyhee Braves seemed to score at will, whenever they touched the ball they rang up another touchdown.

The two programs have traditionally been filled with Native American players, many of them from the same clan or extended family.

So every Bulldogs-Braves face off becomes a battle for bragging rights. 

“As the game went on, I was keeping an eye on the kids. The kind of success Owyhee was having didn’t come every day. You could see their heads get big, the cockiness come out,” Donston says. “That’s when the chatter started to happen, the trash talking.”

Pretty quickly the Bulldogs fell hopelessly behind.

Donston remembers a sense of dread.

“I  thought, ‘C’mon Owyhee, take your foot off gas peddle.’ Oftentimes, I’ll say to the winning coach, ‘This game’s over, you should play the kids who need to play.’” 

Then he looked over at the McDermitt sideline. 

“There weren’t any kids. All eight kids they had were already on the field.”

Donston had a quick talk with his refereeing partner. On many plays after big hits, the McDermitt players were slow getting up. The refs let them take a few moments to gather themselves, so they could rest before the whistle blew for the next play.

Even into the fourth quarter, the Owyhee coach was calling for deep passes downfield. Donston wanted to call the coach aside and say, “You got mad in your leaner years when teams did that to you. Give the ball to a kid who’s never run before in his life.”

Along with that lopsided scoring, the referee says, came a real sense of poise being shown by the losers.

“I can hear the huddles,” he said. “And I never heard any of the McDermitt kids say anything derogatory, like ‘I want to quit’ or ‘This sucks,’ like you would expect from a bunch of teenagers. “

In fact, it was quite the opposite.

“They’d go back to huddle and give each other encouragement. They’d say things like ‘C’mon man, get your block, we gotta get a first down.’ It wasn’t older kids barking at younger ones, it was just encouragement, like ‘We need you.’”

He found himself rooting for McDermitt.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘C’mon, McDermitt, bust one, get one around corner and just run.’ I was just willing them to score.”

Then, suddenly, came an Owyhee misplay deep in their own territory.

A McDermitt player tackled the quarterback in his own end zone.

A few McDermitt kids hadn’t realized what had happened, but the older boys knew they’d finally scored. The younger guys finally caught on, shouting, “Yeah, we scored!”

“I was so glad to see that,” Donston recalled. “Finally, they’d scored a safety. And I thought ‘That’s it. McDermitt is on the board. It was like they’d won the Super Bowl.”

When the game was finally over, the referee went home and wrote his letter to the school superintendent.

“I had just watched those McDermitt boys take their ass-kicking like men, and I had to let him know,” Donston recalled. “I wanted to inspire those kids, to tell them, ‘Keep playing football. Keep being a good person.’”

He knew that coming from a referee, his comments might mean something.

He said he'd never seen a better-coached team. There was a reason those kids acted like adults.

“I just wanted to recognize good sportsmanship, because nobody does that anymore.”

He wishes the best for the Bulldogs this season.

“Whether it’s on the Internet or on Sports Center, you don’t hear about teams losing like adults,” Donston said. “There just aren’t many teams that, collectively, are good sports.”

But that day in May, a high school football referee saw the highly-unlikely.

A bunch of boys, losing like men.