The Denver West High School Cowboys enter tonight’s finale against Golden with zero victories and nine defeats.
They have been outscored 514-12.
In Week 6, Dakota Ridge beat the Cowboys 82-0. The week before that, Heritage pasted them 70-0.
Hardly any fans show up to their football games. Sometimes, classmates ridicule the players in the West High hallways.
But these Cowboys aren’t losers.
“I can’t tell you how much respect I have for the kids over there who stuck it out,” Dakota Ridge coach Ron Woitalewicz said. “I looked across the field and they had maybe 19 kids dressed out and maybe 16 people in the stands. I felt bad for those kids. But you know what? Those kids should be proud of themselves. They don’t need to come out here and get their brains beat in playing football, but they stuck it out.”
Which raises the question: Why?
Why keep playing a rough sport against bigger, faster, deeper and much more experienced teams?
“My parents taught me to go all the way,” said Juan Ortiz, a senior quarterback and defensive end who hopes to attend college on a baseball scholarship. “In grades, in life, you have to finish. Even though things might not be good in life, you have to go for it.”
Despite the weekly scoreboard, junior center and defensive tackle Adam Salinas never thought about chucking his orange-and-black uniform.
“Yeah, it’s been a rough season,” Salinas said. “But we are a family here at West. Juan is like a brother to me. And the coaches care for us. We know that. So we just keep coming out and trying our best.”
Before a practice this week, players spent about 10 minutes picking up trash from the practice field.
“You’ve got to keep it clean,” coach Mike Anthony said matter-of-factly. “We came out here yesterday, and there were a bunch of beer bottles all over the place. We had to clean up those too.”
Monday night, Anthony stayed late at the hospital with David Lira, a lineman who had severely injured his ankle stepping in a sprinkler-head hole.
Anthony, a 1990 graduate of West, is in his second season coaching the team. The Cowboys were 1-9 last year. Anthony also has been West’s wrestling coach for eight years.
After graduating from West, he earned a degree in chemistry from Northern Colorado. Anthony has a good job with the federal government, so he certainly doesn’t have to spend his afternoons teaching football fundamentals to a team with only two seniors and virtually no hope of winning. He doesn’t have to sit for hours with a teenager in a hospital emergency room.
But he does.
“I wanted to give back to West,” he said. “I always remember my coaches here and what they did for me.”
Still, what do you tell a bunch of beat-up kids with bruised feelings after they’ve lost 82-0?
Anthony contemplated the question with a sigh, then said: “The main thing we focus on, before or after a game, is that we care about them, whether we win or lose. If I only focused on the wins and losses, I would have gotten out of here last year. But we aren’t just coaches for a lot of these kids. We are father figures for them, we are mentors. You can’t turn your back on them.”
A team — and a family
Many of West’s players come from single-parent homes. Some, like senior Jeremy Page, essentially have no family at all. Page lives in a group home, attending Joan Farley Academy, an alternative high school. Wanting to play football, he received permission to join the Cowboys.
“Things aren’t too good with my own family, so this team became my family,” Page said. “I’m pretty thankful to have Coach and my teammates.”
Page’s season ended last week when he took a helmet to the ribs in the Cowboys’ 58-6 loss to Denver North. A chipped rib scarred his liver.
This year was Page’s first in tackle football, but that’s not unusual at West, where lack of experience is the norm. Many of the Latino-American students, after years of playing soccer, are trying American football for the first time.
“We get freshmen and sophomores and even juniors here who have never put on the pads,” Anthony said. “They might have thrown the football around or played flag football, but they don’t know a lot. You have to teach them a three-point stance, teach them a cadence, all of the basics. Most of the kids from the suburbs have been playing in the same system for five or six years.”
The disparity is striking. In Dakota Ridge’s 82-0 demolition of the Cowboys, the Eagles ran just 20 plays of offense the entire game, averaging 14.47 yards per rush. The Eagles had 405 yards of total offense to the Cowboys’ minus-15. The Eagles scored two touchdowns on interception returns and once on a fumble return.
“We scored at least 30 points with our JV kids in there,” Woitalewicz said. “Of course you don’t want to run up the score, but you also can’t tell your own kids to stop playing hard. But by the end of the game, I caught myself cheering for those West kids to do something well. And at the end of the game, those kids came over and shook our hands and kept their heads up. That impressed me.”
Pride must suffice
No amount of sugarcoating can cover up just how bad the Cowboys are, but there is a little bit of hope. West loses only two seniors from a program with 36 players. Next year, with full funding from the Denver Broncos, Denver inner-city middle schools will resurrect tackle football programs. Finally, the Cowboys will have a consistent feeder program.
But until a few victories come West’s way, pride will have to suffice.
Said Ortiz: “I’ll have guys come up to me in school and say, ‘West (stinks)’ or ‘I’m better than anybody on your whole team.’ I just say, ‘Instead of talking about it, why don’t you come out and play?’ I’m out there showing it. I know we aren’t that good, but I’ve stuck it out.”
Patrick Saunders: 303-954-1428 or psaunders@denverpost.com
