Fairplay
Anyone who has lived in a small town can attest that it’s a monumental task to keep anything quiet. It’s no different in this bedroom community of around 700 near Breckenridge Ski Resort.
So it was with the South Park High School Burros, who haven’t won a football game since 2004 but didn’t require much help from gossipers to get wind of new gear heading their way this season.
“They didn’t know right away, but it started leaking out,” Burros coach David Patrick said. “They were saying, ‘Hey, he’s trying to get new helmets.’ ”
By donating their salaries for this season, Patrick and assistant Derek Ebel freed up about $4,000 to purchase 30 new helmets for the Burros’ 21-player roster – including eight freshmen – an appreciative bunch who excitedly called dibs on boxes of new, shiny and much safer head gear delivered over three days before their second game last week.
“It’s amazing, one of the coolest things to happen to this school,” senior defensive end Josh Krutsch said.
Patrick, true to his Southern twang, gave what locals have come to know as his usual aw-shucks response when cited for the gesture.
“We were trying to get the kids new helmets last year, but we couldn’t get enough funds,” Patrick said. “We just decided to donate our check. The helmets we had were getting old and we as coaches just decided that, ‘Hey, I’ve got a good job.’ ”
Patrick, an excavator by trade and in his second year as the Burros’ head coach after one as an assistant, dug up a conversation with Ebel, the team’s only other paid coach. They also received input from volunteer assistant Stan Rovira. It was a unanimous decision.
“We thought that these kids deserved something, especially with them playing ironman football last year, and this year, too,” Patrick said.
A year ago, the Burros of the Class 1A South Central League suited up only 15 players. They have added half a dozen more, but coaches must take part at practice to have anything resembling an intrasquad scrimmage. Add up sickness, injuries and players having other appointments or commitments, and South Park goes through more drills with dummies than do ventriloquists.
South Park has a high school enrollment of 140 that is on a four-day weekly schedule to help cut energy and transportation costs as well as ensure no student-athlete travels to compete on a school night. Just as Patrick still openly recruits hallways for players – “Have to,” he said after one of his inquiries was turned down by a boy in favor of an after-school job and snowboarding – the first frost on vehicles has been witnessed here at 9,953 feet.
However, it has been awhile since anyone wandered into school and asked who was going to “off” Kenny, one of the previous running gags on the foul-mouthed-kid cartoon with the same name as the high school.
“We do what we have to do,” South Park athletic director Jan Toyne said of the tight-knit community.
Whether it’s the local supermarket donating volleyballs, other school personnel performing tasks “for nothing” or the football coaches donating helmets, “it’s awesome,” she said.
That was the reaction of Burros players, who forgot for a moment that their program has dropped 25 games in a row, Colorado’s longest current losing streak. During that stretch, they have been outscored 993-182. In 2006, the Burros scored only 38 points in nine games.
They were as animated as any cartoon character when the helmets arrived.
“We were way too excited,” Krutsch said when the first box was opened.
New tools can help create new attitudes, too, the South Park coaches hope. The team’s previous helmets were white and bland; the new ones, much sharper looking, are gold with green face masks. Patrick said the switch was made to match the uniforms, but the Burros embraced the unannounced idea of a symbolic color change for a new look and feel.
“Our old helmets were pretty beat up,” junior receiver and defensive back Pete Ambrose said. “The new ones fit so snugly. The old ones had so many pressure points on them.”
Said Krutsch: “You should have seen the ones we had before. They were horrible. They were junk. They were tin buckets that weighed about 5 pounds. The last game with the new helmet, I probably had three head- to-heads and didn’t feel a thing.”
The Burros are more determined than ever to end their losing streak and help pay back their head coach.
“It shows that he loves his team,” senior defensive back and receiver Cory Bradshaw said of Patrick. “We were all stoked.”
Perhaps not as much as Patrick, who “gets as crazy as a high school player,” senior quarterback Tyler Blair said.
For Patrick, whose 0-2 team hosts No. 2-ranked Burlington on Saturday, it’s no different than his years of coaching at the youth level for the Turkey Trojans in Plant City, Fla.
“I never got paid to do it,” he said.
Staff writer Neil H. Devlin can be reached at 303-954-1714 or ndevlin@denverpost.com.
Playing small-school football
There’s nothing cartoonish about South Park’s numbers:
The Burros have 21 players on their roster, including eight freshmen.
They have lost 25 games in a row by an average of 32 points.
The school offers only two paid coaching positions.
Head coach David Patrick and assistant Derek Abel passed on their salaries in 2007 in order to purchase 30 new Riddell helmets at a cost of about $4,000.
