Shaky Start To My Football Season

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate October 2001

download word file, 3 pages 2.0

Downloaded 1410 times

Writing Project 1 Draft 1 A Shaky Start to My Senior Football Season This football season had started out kind of shaky. It was in July sometime that one of my classmates, Brian Hansen, who would have been the starting end on the varsity football team, injured his shoulder on his dirt bike. He was on his way out of town when he went into the ditch end over end and separated his shoulder. He needed surgery right away and was told he would not play football and would hopefully play basketball. He is still going to do cardiovascular workouts on a regular basis. Another senior, Tim Wellinstien, that would have been playing injured his neck last year in football and was told not to play this year.

So August 7 came around pretty fast and it was time to start football practice, with only three seniors practicing, Seth Eide, Jeremy Peterson and me.

We started in with our regular daily practices. But we were dealt more complications after just the 5th or 6th day of practice, another senior, Seth, who is probably the best player we have, went to the doctor because his knee bothered him in practice. He found out he had some torn or missing cartilage in his knee and of course needed surgery immediately. He was told he could be back in 6-8 weeks.

Not only did we have few seniors we also have very few underclassmen out for football, only a total of 18 dressing players on the team! Now with just us two seniors we went through a couple more weeks of hard practice before our first game against the Estelline Redman. We went into the game playing hard and ended the game playing hard but despite our efforts we were defeated. Luckily for us we left with only a couple minor injuries and the common bumps and bruises.

The next week we faced the WGV (Wakonda-Gayille-Volin) Raiders at our first home game of the year on our new football field; our field like our team was in ruff shape. We of course came into the game fired up and ready to play in front of our home crowd. WGV kicked off to us to start the game. We ran the ball hard gaining yards and driving the ball toward the end zone. But along comes another bump in our already rocky start to the season; Jeremy, the other senior with me, injured his foot. He was taken to the hospital in Viborg to be X-rayed for a break; luckily there was only a slight chance of a hairline fracture. Jeremy would still have to stay off his foot for at least a week. Which meant I would have to play in the next game as the only senior.

The next week's practice started as usual on Monday, we watched a tape of the team we would be faced with that Friday night, the Dell Rapids Saint Mary's Cardinals. The Cardinals had a few more players than us Tornadoes did. It was a hot and sunny Friday evening as we prepared to smash helmets with the Saint Mary's Cardinals. We got through our pre-game warm-up and were receiving the ball first. Dan Ostrem and I were back to receive the kick. Dan had been having a little trouble catching and holding on to the ball this season. Dan is only a sophomore with no experience playing on the varsity football team but yet starting this year consequently do to our shortage of numbers. The ball was kicked to Dan, as expected he did not catch the ball cleanly, he was able to scramble for a few yards after picking up the ball. We did not make much of a drive for the end zone as we attempted to run the ball through the three and four holes. We were forced to punt. The Cardinals made a successful drive, running the right through our line and through the linebackers to score six points and tag on the extra point for a 7-0 lead just a few minutes into the first quarter. Things did not look good.

Going into the second quarter we were down 20-0. We were still fired up and realized we had to play 3 more quarters. Starting out with the ball we ran and hit hard, we were unable to put the ball in the end zone after our first possession. On defense we made some good stops and made an interception. Yet after the second quarter of play we were still unable to score. We help the Cardinals to only 7 points that quarter.

772 Words