Big hearts make up for small numbers

Quarterback Brad Heden has played on high school football teams with more than 40 teammates, but currently he’s nursing a concussion playing on a two-win Valley Christian team that fields just 17 players. When the Panthers take the field, they’re usually outnumbered at least two to one.

The teen has a wry grin on his face when he says without a doubt he prefers the small team. It doesn’t matter if you’re holding up one finger, but he’s seeing two, or two fingers and he has it right. Valley Christian is a team the plays the role of David every weekend to the other teams Goliath no matter who it plays – fill in the blank – which is they way the Panthers like it.

“The difference is we know each other better. We rely on each other more,” Heden says. “We play the entire game.”

It’s a football team that almost wasn’t. Last year, when coach Jim Puryear and other parents started talking about forming the 32-year-old school’s first football team, they’d planned to start a middle school team, something that would create a pool of experienced younger players who would eventually play varsity at the 100-student high school. Puryear figured he’d move up with the team, handing off the middle school coaching duties to someone else.

But when word about the team reached the high school, students there argued they should be first. Most of the students at Valley Christian, which is located at the old University High School on Ninth Avenue and Herald Road, really didn’t know much about football. As students of a parochial school they’d never had a chance to play. Valley Christian students from Worley, Idaho, to the South Hill, have friends playing football at public schools.

“I’ve always wanted to play, but the thing that was holding me back, was that we didn’t have a team,” said Jack Poston, one of the five seniors playing his first and only year of high school football.

In truth, it would have been possible for Poston and others to play for one of the local public schools, which do allow kids schooled at home or privately to come play on public school teams. However there is a natural outsider factor to being on campus only to play sports that discourages some private school students.

Only one or two Valley Christian players tried playing sports at a public school, but when the signup sheet for football was posted at the parochial school, two dozen wrote down their names. Puryear considered the two dozen kids a manageable number. There are teams that size in Class B, which is the division in which the Panthers play.

However several of those initial recruits proved ineligible or had conflicts. The creation of football ended boys soccer at Valley Christian for lack of players. By the time the team was fielded, Puryear was down to 16 guys, a number more suited to eight-man football. Unique to extremely small schools, eight-man would have allowed the Panthers to split their team evenly between offense and defense, allowing half the team to rest while the other half played.

That’s not what the team wanted, Puryear says. For the students, it was 11-man football, just like the pros play on Sunday, just like their public school counterparts play on Friday nights, or nothing at all.

But 11-man football with 16 players is brutal to say the least. The Panthers play an entire 2 1/2 hours of football and rarely leave the field, which leaves only five standing on the sideline at any given time. To make substitutions possible, each Panther player learns at least three different positions; some play as many as six.

It is not uncommon for the five players standing on the Panther sideline, to look across the field and see 20 kids waiting to get in the game for the opponent.

“That’s hard,” Republic coach Shawn Corbin says, of playing with so few kids. “We only had 16 or 17 kids at the end of last year because of injuries. You cringe because nobody can get hurt. … It’s also hard to practice.”

When Valley Christian practices, coach Puryear uses garbage cans to mark the places on the field where there would be players, if the team had enough bodies for its starters to practice against. When the cans aren’t out, Puryear asks his players to simply imagine the would-be players they’re scrimmaging against. They block them, dodge them, run right through them without ever seeing a real opponent until game day, which has led to some confusion.

After spending fall camp blocking a garbage can, that hypothetically was trying to run down the Panther quarterback, Jack Poston, got the impression that the defender had to block him back. That didn’t prove to be the case in the Panthers’ first game when a defensive end for Soap Lake ran right around Poston and blindsided Heden.

Jack “just gets up and he’s like, ‘Dude, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again,’ ” Heden recalled. “I said, ‘It better not.’ “

Five games later, the Panthers were forced to forfeit one of the games due to mounting injuries, a big disappointment to the players who still wanted to play as long as they had 11 healthy bodies. There’s a never-quit attitude to the thin Panther team that shows up in everything it does.

In drills, the Panthers run two kinds of sprints. One exercise involves the person running to go as long and hard as he can, not handing the duty off until he absolutely cannot go another lap. The other drill involves the next person in line to raise his hand and volunteer to replace the person running in front of him, as soon as he’s ready to shoulder the load. The lesson in both cases is to carry the burden of team and to never leave any one member carrying it for too long.

“We have a team saying, ‘Hold the rope,’ ” Heden said. “Because it’s like the entire team is on the other end of the rope and if you let go, the entire team falls down.”

In games, Puryear tells the players there’s nowhere to hide, no bench to which they can retreat. True to the coach’s word, at home games there are no benches.

“I also tell them that I’d take our 17 players over the best 17 players from any school,” Puryear said. So far, no school has taken the Panthers up on that offer, though two have fallen to the ironman crew, which proved itself unstoppable against Selkirk Oct. 5 and again last week against Manson, which lost at home to the Panthers 49-14.

The most recent win will surely highlight Valley Christian’s next film session. The team gets together at Puryear’s Otis Orchards home every Thursday for spaghetti and film. To date, the Panther players have watched their previously lone win against Selkirk followed by a few games underscoring where they need to improve.

Other coaches might gather their players to watch films earlier in the week and focus on the next game, but Puryear wants his kids to focus on their own performance and to focus on being the best, first-ever Valley Christian team they can possibly be.

After games, after practice, the coach draws them together in a tight circle for prayer, then every player thanks God personally for the one thing he’s thankful for.

“I’m thankful for medicine,” says Jed Puryear, who with two weeks left has developed a noticeable limp.

“I’m thankful for hot showers,” says the quarterback Heden.

“I’m thankful to my teammates,” says Ivan Solodyankin.

“Amen,” says the team.