Very Next Play Our Coach Waters example essay topic

It was the very next Friday night after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York. Two days after the Deer Valley School District decided not to postpone week two of our high school football schedule for mourning purposes for the September 11th victims. "Live your life like it didn't happen but do not forget it" and "don't let terrorism run your life" are what people are saying. Even though there is a sense of national security nervousness in every ones minds. Before the game my coach, Mike Waters, gets our team together on a knee and says things will be different now and that is the way it is.

Coach Waters had been our coach for fours years and has been very influential in our team. He also says that we need to just go out and for at least 3 hours take the stress and nervousness off of people thinking about what our country is going through. So for Friday night on September 14, 2001, we head out to our home field at Barry Goldwater High School to play one of our rivals, the Camelback Spartans. As we head out on the field each team, underneath the bright and hot field lights three or four stories high and each team underneath the goal posts on opposite ends of the field, proceed to do their preliminary stretching and pre-game drills. Fifteen minutes before kickoff the announcer of the game announces for everyone to please stand up and remove your caps because it is time for the playing of the national anthem performed live by our own school band. Each coach has his team line on the twenty yard line, us on the north twenty yard line and them on the south.

Then the head coach from each team along with one of each team's captain's and for our game that night Coach Waters picked our starting running-back Nick Manzo. Now each head coach with one team captain stands on our schools logo on the fifty yard line, side by side, hand in hand, singing the national anthem. At the end of the national anthem it was time, time to go play our football game and lift our communities's pirits. Now it is time for the kickoff and our kicker, Josh Wilbur, kicks a beauty of a kick that is so deep in the end-zone the Spartans do not even return it. Their first play from the line of scrimmage was a tricky one. They handed it off to their running back who then instead of running the ball threw a pass.

The pass turned out to be incomplete because our cornerback did his job to perfection and swatted the ball out of the air. After that scare of a play their offense went three and out and punted the ball over to us. As we walked up to the line of scrimmage for our first play the crowd starts to get louder and cheer us on. But as luck would have it their defense stopped us and forced a three and out. We punted the ball back and forth a couple more times to each other to make the first quarter a very defensive one. Coach Waters decides to go long on what would be the last play of the first quarter and called a "hail mary" but our TJ Bayus, our starting quarterback threw a lousy pass and it was intercepted by one of Camelback's defensive backs and as the clocked ticked down to zero, the Spartans were ready to start in scoring position for the start of the second quarter.

With our defense on their heels because of our slow productive offense the Spartans didn't waste any time scoring. As our crowd cheered to distract them, all it took was one 15 yard pass for them to score the first touchdown of the game. As they took the momentum of the game we tried to scrape some up ourselves as we blocked their extra point attempt. After the kickoff, the ball now in our possession our coach decides to run "Trap Right".

The ball is hiked and our full back, Justin Fyfe, takes the handoff from our Bayus and runs right off the trap block from myself, the left guard on our offensive line. Fyfe sprints, dodges, and jukes his way to a 40 yard run, finally to be taken down in the Spartan's territory. Now as the clock now winds down to about a minute left in the first half our Bayus tells all of us in our huddle that we need to score before the half to have some kind of momentum for the second half. So, we did just that. In a series of four plays starting on their 30 yard line we marched 30 yards for a touchdown and the lead before half time. Coming out of the locker room and looking up at the scoreboard past the bright field lights to see our team winning 7-6 was really exciting.

Since we kicked off to them at the beginning of the game; now we had the ball after halftime. As our kick-returner accepted the kick he took it for the best return of the game, only to have our offense fumble the ball to the other team on the very next play. Now that the Spartans had the ball and were confident in scoring all they did was run the ball and let the clock run down. After having the ball for six straight minutes and moving the ball 48 yards to our three yard line on eleven plays, they now had the ball again as another quarter ended. With their first play to start the fourth quarter the score was still 7-6 in our favor. But their first play of the fourth quarter was a tricky reverse which their wide receiver scored easily on as our defense all ran the other way thinking another player had the ball.

So as the fourth quarter passed by with the score 14-7 in their favor, our Bayus threw two crucial interceptions, but our defense kept us in the game with an interception of their own and a fourth down stop for a turnover on downs. As the clock winds down and with just over a minute and a half to go we started with the ball on our own 48 yard line. On our very next play we had a nice big run by our starting running-back, Manzo, for 37 yards to put us on their 15 yard line. We did not have any timeouts so we had to use our no-huddle offense.

Our next three plays were all routed by the stingy Spartans defense. As our fourth and could be final down came up we needed just 10 yards to keep the ball. Bayus now hiked the ball and threw it to our receiver only to have it tipped up into the air by their defensive linebacker, but luckily it fell back down into the hands of our tight-end who was running a cross route pass them, and he ran out of bounds at the two yard line with seven second left in the game. On the very next play our Coach Waters called a quarterback sneak and we hiked the ball and plunged the ball deep in the end zone for our late fourth quarter touchdown. So now with our extra point we could tie the game up at fourteen a piece, but our coach didn't want a tie. He wanted a win.

With that in mind our coach easily called the same play we had just scored with to get the job done. With the game on the line Bayus sends Manzo in a motion right and as he jogs just about behind Bayus he hikes the ball and hands it off to Manzo who sprints to his right only to have three Spartan defenders coming his way like a steam train. As Manzo changes his who running direction our offensive line tries to adjust our blocking to this now broken play. Manzo is running to the right now looking for any available hole in the line of scrimmage but sees none and just as he tries to make one for himself one of the Spartans defensive lineman dives and catches Manzo dragging him down. As Manzo is falling to the ground realizing that if his knees touch the ground we will lose the game just throws the ball into the air hoping for a miracle for it to be caught by one of our players. Maybe it was luck, maybe it was the miracle that Manzo was wishing for but as the ball came down it fell right into the hands of our leader, our quarterback TJ Bayus, standing in the end-zone.

We had won the game. The crowd cheered and our team united in the end-zone for our most glorious of that season. With that game being our longest in our schools history running about four and a half hours long, both teams with minimal energy, if either team even had any left, met at mid-field, shook hands and headed back to each of our locker rooms. As we all took a knee in the center of our locker room, as we did after every game, Coach Waters began to talk. He said, "That we played one hell of a game and that everyone that witnessed that game we just played had most defiantly forgotten about what was going in with our nation's crisis". After taking our showers and leaving the locker room I noticed that not one person from the crowd had left until all of our players came out of the locker room.

After the last person and all the coaches came out the crowd, our fans, gave us a stand ovation for our hard work. So now for the last four hours we had lifted our communities's pirits at least for a little bit. As we all stood in awe and pure passion of the moment it seemed as if we didn't just lift our communities's pirits, but America's. It may not have been America's spirits we directly effected ourselves but if that Friday night every high school game in the country was like the one we had played... maybe we did lift America's.

Or at least we did our part.