On with the show, this is it!
Since 1921, the long-running performance that is Colorado schoolboy football has played to millions, drawn consistently rave reviews by even the most stringent of critics and easily been the recognizable sport of choice in the Rocky Mountains and High Plains.
The basic theme – young men in search of a common goal in athletics through hard work and fun – is easy to understand, but the overall story about to be told for the 85th time is best absorbed by following its characters.
Ladies and gentlemen, Colorado prep football has characters, thousands of them in 2005 again enlisted from an interesting pool of mainstays and new faces and are set for another high-tech season of interactive sports experience that literally gets the most hits here as well as nationally.
To put on a high school football game is to join a union, officially and otherwise, and requires more jobs than those held by Homer Simpson.
All are labors of love.
“I wouldn’t trade this for the world,” Vilas coach Jeff Shelton said.
First, of course, there are the state’s players, who hail everywhere from Cherry Hills Village to Crook and in 2005 include the aptly named Kyle Hitt of Northglenn. There’s also Fleming’s Jake Helgoth, surely a sight not to be missed – he stands 7-feet-1 and will compete in 6-man.
While coaches and officials would complete a bare-bones version, so much of the savory flavor comes from others, everyone from the well-known to the anonymous, who make it what it is.
Somebody’s mom running the cash register in concessions. The dads who work the chains. Announcer. Statistician. Filmer. Ticket seller. Ticket taker. Teachers who earn a couple of extra bucks keeping an eye on the crowd. The fans who range from grandparents to newborn infants, students and alumni. Athletic director.
Singer of the national anthem. Someone from maintenance. Police officer. The person who runs the press box. If teams are lucky, an athletic trainer or, in their wildest dreams, a team doctor. Team manager. Cheerleader. Program seller. Moms who sell T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, stickers, seat cushions, discount cards to local businesses and anything else that will generate a few bucks for the team. Reporters. Ball boys who also run out to retrieve kicking tees. Grill people. Poms squad.
The person with the key who opens the gates and locks them afterward. Janitor. Lawn-mower (for natural grass) or vacuum-blower (artificial surface) operator. Assistants who primarily hold what appear to be miles of cable wires to headsets and tell the team when to come out of the locker room after halftime. Clock operator.
Parents who organize team meals. Students who paint their faces and vehicles. Parking lot attendant (extremely optional on this level). Radio and television broadcasters. Game jersey washer. Bus driver. Coaches’ wives. Future hopefuls. Program ad seller. Athletic secretaries. The school band. A scout elsewhere watching next week’s opponent. Parents and siblings who drive players to home games. Photographers for the yearbook and school newspaper. A casual follower from the neighborhood.
It wouldn’t be a high school football game without them.
Carl vs. gophers
From the seat of his 1445 Series John Deere Front Mower, Carl Zellars listens to the grass.
As groundskeeper for West Grand’s lush new multifield sports and leisure complex in Kremmling, Zellars pays particular attention to what the grass has to say.
“You just have to pay very, very close attention to what the field tells you,” Zellars said from the district’s bus barn, where he also works as transportation director. “It’s like a baby. You’ve got to feed it, water it, take care of it and watch it grow.”
Less than a year ago, West Grand’s football field was nothing more than a dusty home to thousands of gophers.
“The fields were pathetic,” football coach Chris Brown said.
Things quickly changed. A group of locals had been working for four years collecting donations, applying for grants and Lotto funds, accepting any help residents and businesses were willing to offer toward the building of athletic fields for the high, middle and elementary schools. That group, called Forward Motion, collected enough money for a football field, a state-of-the-art eight-lane track, a practice field, a soccer field, a landscaped walking path, and a Cobra-type helicopter that serves as a veterans memorial.
Zellars was charged with laying sod and helping grow everything on the complex, but, like his namesake, Carl Spackler, in “Caddyshack,” he had to get rid of the gophers.
He could do that, didn’t even need a reason to do that.
“You looked out and the field moved,” Zellars said of the gophers. “We had to go through a process of relocating them, however it was that worked.”
Zellars, along with maintenance chief Bear Frederickson and Zellars’ son, Claver, a former West Grand football player and linebacker at Mesa State College, began the process of growing grass. They brought in topsoil from Denver and from an old lake bed nearby, and soon banished the brush that dominated the area.
A 25-year veteran police officer-turned school district employee, Zellars and crew then ran into problems, including a blight fungus that turned the grass yellow. Zellars contacted Ross Kurcab, turf manager for Invesco Field at Mile High, and a friend at Blue Valley Ranch in Kremmling. After trial-and-error, they created a precise formula of water, fertilizer, aeration, mowing and hand-seeding. Nearly every day, they adjust sprinkler heads, spread seeds, monitor heat levels … and listen to the grass.
“I want other coaches to come in and say, ‘Wow,”‘ Zellars said. “I want them to walk away knowing they played on something special.”
Said Brown: “People can’t believe our facility now … And people drive in now and say, ‘Whoa.”‘
Zellars, a former West Grand player, aims for a field that he would have liked playing on.
“It’s a passion for me,” he said. “I want these kids to know when they go out that they’re playing on the best field in the state, for all the sports that use them. I want the West Grand tradition to be back to where it should be.”
Sail away
The St. Mary’s Pirates don’t sail anywhere without a blessing from Father Rawley Myers.
Myers, approaching 80, according to friends, was a former teacher at the Colorado Springs school and hasn’t missed a football game in anyone’s recollection. Rain or shine. Home or away. Even though the Pirates haven’t finished with a winning record since 2001.
Myers wears a green Pirates cap and is the only non-coach allowed on the St. Mary’s sideline during games. Before each game, Myers says a prayer for the squad.
“He’s the spiritual leader of the team,” Pirates athletic director Ed Latimer said.
Myers even has a St. Mary’s letter jacket, flag and a jersey with the number 12, designating him the obvious 12th man.
Although he is an author and still leads weekly masses at the school, Myers spurns any recognition for his work and even declined to comment on his love for football.
Coach Matt Walter said he couldn’t imagine a kickoff without Myers.
“It wouldn’t be the same without having him there before the games,” Walter said.
Said Latimer, “It’s just an expectation that he’s going to be there to do that.”
No small jobs
At the state’s smaller levels, the tasks of coach take on much more than just calling the plays on the sidelines and directing practice.
“You name it, we’re involved with it,” Shelton said.
At 6-man Aguilar, coach Frank Coppa also is the team’s chauffeur on road games. The Wildcats have three road games this season – at Vilas, Kit Carson and Bethune – that total more than 1,200 miles round trip and nearly 22 hours on the bus.
“It’s some sort of district policy that no one bus driver can be on duty for more than 12 hours,” Coppa said, “so we hired a bus driver to come with us on road games, and when I drive out, they will drive back. That’s probably a good thing, because I won’t be in any shape to do it after games.”
As for Shelton, he has been with the program since its inception three years ago and undertook the transition of the Broncos’ home field – a buffalo grass pasture that was painful even to sit on – to a new artificial surface.
“I water it, I paint it and am in charge of basically all of the groundskeeping duties,” said Shelton, who also took the Broncos to the playoffs last season for the first time. “I turn the lights on before the game, I turn the lights out after the game.
“I’ll even take a class out with me on game day to help set up the yard markers.”
On the other end, 5A Cherry Creek district athletic director John Green did a little of that, and then some, with Legacy Stadium in Aurora. Green was so involved with the now 3-year-old elaborate facility’s design, construction, spot-checking and policing that his plaque already should have been mounted.
Color that one a big job.
According to Green, “the guy in charge (during construction) said he hadn’t seen so many earth movers since Da Nang in Vietnam,” when they were putting in runways.
Family fan
A graduate of Hugo in 1940, Jean Stone remembers not caring much for schoolboy football in those days.
That changed after she married Cecil Stone, had three sons and two grandsons who have put on a helmet and shoulder pads for the fabled Limon Badgers.
Never mind her knee problems, the woman who first got the bug watching her family compete in 1965 and has sat through all kinds of weather still can drive herself to the school.
“It’s a great way to spend a Friday night,” she said.
Jean told her younger grandson, Joe, a sophomore for the Badgers, that she didn’t know if she could make it three more years to see him cap his prep career.
“But he told me, ‘Yeah, sure you will, grandma,”‘ she said.
It’s her job, one she embraces.
Brady Delander, Brian Forbes, Nick Groke and Jon E. Yunt contributed to this report.
Neil H. Devlin, high school sports editor, can be reached at 303-820-1714 or ndevlin@denverpost.com.
