Another Round at the Say When: The Football Season That Wasn't
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.
High school football locker rooms see both elation and despair, equal to the highs and lows young players will face as they hang up their cleats and move on in life.
There are the high-fives and back slaps after victories.
And the helmet-banging, and sometimes tears, that comes with defeat.
But rarely does a team of young athletes encounter such a weighted, emotional scene as the McDermitt Bulldogs do on this Tuesday afternoon in September.
It is day in which an entire season hangs in the balance.
Back in the day, this town was once an eight-man football powerhouse. The local boys were expected to win. The locals lined the streets and blew car horns to send them off to away games, and held parades and staged block parties when they brought home the trophies.
In the 1970s and 80s, McDermitt was known for smash-mouth football. Not only were they going to beat you, they were going to hit you as well, and hard.
Then the mine closed and families drifted away.
All that winning is just a memory now.
The 2:54 p.m. bell for the end of classes has just sounded. Students clamor onto two yellow school buses that will deliver them to farms, ranches and a Native American reservation, some of the stops an hour away.
The seven boys that comprise the Bulldogs are already in the locker room.
They should be changing out of their street clothes, fetching helmets, mouthguards and shoulder pads from the nearby equipment room.
They should be ready to take the field, throwing the ball, doing stretches and preparing for their daily 3 p.m. practice.
But they aren't.
They are still here, sitting on low-slung wooden benches.
Many have their heads down.
They are seven strong, and that is the problem.
They play eight-man football.
They are one short.
For weeks now, they have come to practice, but only on one day do they reach their full compliment. As a team, as a cohesive unit, they never quite make it.
Their season hinged upon the actions of two holdouts.
One already decided he will not play.
Today, they will learn of the second boy’s decision.
In the coming days, they are due to play an away game under the Friday night lights against the Carlin Railroaders, another small-town team a long, bumpy bus ride away.
After that, there are three other games. Against teams in Owyhee, Wells and Eureka.
Now these boys need to know: Are they still a team? Are they eight, or are they not?
Will they have a season, or will they have to forfeit?
And walk away.
For the four seniors, the stakes are even higher. This is their last chance to take part in the autumnal rite of high school football. Performing in front of people they know, for good or bad.
Some are already applying for colleges. One hopes that a good season will maybe catch the eye of a small-college talent scout, who might offer him a scholarship to play football on the university level, just like his father did.
They call for a meeting with their coaches.
They need to know.
At 3 p.m., Coach Richard Egan addresses the seven boys. Egan is a big man with a linebacker’s body, who played on the school’s 1982 championship team.
He has finished a call to the principal’s office. The holdout was sitting next to the principal. The coach could hear his voice on the speaker phone.
If he was going to play, the time to say so was now.
"I’m not playing,” he said.
That's what the coach tells his team.
The other boys knew this was coming, but it lands as a gut-punch just the same.
The coach holds out a last possibility.
"We’ll give him until 3:30 to show up,” he says.
Maybe he’ll change his mind, come walking through that door.
“If not,” Egan says. “We’ll call it a season.”
He pauses.
"You guys know this." he says. "It’s not the way we wanted this to go.”
His face is red. Rarely do you see big men so emotional, even the quiet ones.
This last holdout boy is young, barely 15, and yet he still holds the key to the fate of these older boys. But the coach cannot let him shoulder such blame.
In small towns like McDermitt, populations are fading away like air leaking from a tire. As people move on, they take their kids with them.
That leaves school sports teams undermanned and often desperate.
It's nobody's fault. Certainly not this boy's.
“The buck stops here,” Egan says. “We don’t know what’s going on. Maybe he has some personal problems we don’t know about. When the time comes, he’ll straighten everything out.”
As they wait, the boys seek a release from their stress.
“This might be the last time we get to hit,” the smallest says to the largest. “I want to hit you one last time.”
Others don their helmets and pace. There is a strange sense of sadness in the room, one tinted with relief, as though a grueling physical test, like a marathon, or a football season, or a shotgun wedding, is about to be scratched, avoided.
In many ways, a weight has been lifted. The prospect of another season of taking big hits and big losses. But the boys held out hope. Maybe this year, they'd pay back some teams.
The senior who hopes for a last-ditch chance at a scholarship crouches on the bench, his head in his hands.
Egan huddles inside the office of his assistant, Jack Smith, a compact man with a boxer’s body, who is also the school’s varsity basketball coach.
In November, Smith will coach these same boys on the hardcourt, with Egan as his assistant.
"Should we take one last walk out onto the field?” Smith asks. "You know, have one more practice?”
Egan’s eyes are moist. He shakes his head.
"I’d rather get something out of it,” he says. "Without a real game to play for, there’s going to be a lot of horseplay out there. Somebody’s gonna twist an ankle. You know how kids can be.”
At 3:15 p.m., the suggestion is made that somebody should call the boy at home for a last-minute plea. It is like phoning the governor for an eleventh-hour stay of execution.
The boy hoping for a scholarship volunteers.
He walks into the coach’s tiny office and closes the door behind him.
He sits in the coach’s chair and leans over as the line rings. He wears his black ball cap backwards. He wears sweatpants and workout shoes.
Outside, the locker room clamor continues.
The boy listens to the line buzz for the longest while.
As he waits, you can almost hear a dream die in that room, a younng man's inner-fire extinguished.
Finally, he puts the phone down.
"He’s not answering,” he says.
It is 3:23 p.m.
A few minutes later, the two coaches call for one last meeting as a team.
Their season was over.
Before it even has a chance to start.
McDermitt will forfeit its entire schedule of four games, just as it did in 2013 and 2019.
It's the third time in eight years that fate has turned its back on this small western town and its young football team.
Once again, there just aren't enough bodies.
The coaches stand with their backs to the empty showers. The boys sit in a single row, like in one of those Norman Rockwell paintings that evoke youth and disappointment.
"It’s a shame it has to end this way,” Egan begins. "I’d rather have a season and see you guys perform, especially you seniors. We would have only had four games, but I know that it would have meant a lot to you.”
"Better than nothing,” the biggest kid says. He's a strapping farm boy, helpless now.
"Exactly right,” Egan continues. "We’ve got to hold our heads high. We’ve got other sports to play. And we’ll be there. Jack and I will be there for you guys.”
He turns to his assistant coach, the man the boys call Smith.
On the nearby reservation, calling someone by their last name is a sign of acceptance. Smith lets it slide for football, but with basketball, when he runs the team, it's another matter.
There, it will not be Smith, but Coach Smith.
The boys sometimes call Egan “Dad,” and he looks at it like an honor, an expression of his role as a male mentor some of these boys do not have.
"It’s just a weird feeling,” Smith says. "Kind of like when basketball season ends, I don’t know how you guys feel but I always feel kinda of lost that first day. So many days of practices and games, seeing you guys.”
He pauses. His voice is a croak now.
Soft.
"I want to play football. I want to be up on the grass right now. It’s so close. We’re like this far from having a team. I know you guys want to go play.”
Then Smith says what is on everyone’s mind.
About that last holdout boy.
"I was just imagining that he’d come jogging in here or we'd gotten a hold of him and he’d said, 'I’ll be there in ten.’"
He adds: "I’m a dreamer, too.”
Smith says he will start holding open gym in a few weeks.
They can move on, these same boys, to another sport, against other teams.
All basketball takes is five players, and right now in that locker room, to this youthful team, that is a relief.
"But I don’t even want to talk about that right now,” Smith says.
"I’d rather be up on the grass.”
He doesn't know what else to say.
"I’m pretty choked up right now.”
Egan steps in.
"I thought we’d be here making memories this season, so you’d have stories to share twenty years from now, things you guys could talk about as you grow older together. We can’t have that now.”
Then the boys speak up.
"These four weeks of practice were a lot of fun,” says one senior who wants to become a diesel mechanic. "I wish I could look forward to playing some games with you guys, making those memories.”
He thanks his teammates and his two coaches.
"Let’s starting packing up,” Egan says, "so you guys can get outta here.”
The players take a few group photographs. They shake hands.
Not like boys, but men.
Then they have one last team huddle.
"I had a helluva time with you guys," says the future mechanic.
Then, one by one, these players and their coaches pack up their belongings and filter out of the locker room, a final, hollow ending to this season that wasn’t.
