All for the team

The language of sport has many ways of expressing sacrifice. “Take one for the team.” “Give yourself up.” “There is no I in team.”

But there are sacrifices, and then there are sacrifices, and sometimes the bigger the sacrifice, the less obvious they are.

Ask A.J. Loehding.

The West Valley senior does not make a big deal of the fact that he’s playing a new set of positions in his final high school football season. He considers it part of being a senior leader.

“I think I have a responsibility to the team, to set an example for the younger players,” he says.

West Valley, the smallest school in the Greater Spokane League, knows three things about each new football season: The Eagles will always be outnumbered, outmanned and outgunned.

When Craig Whitney moved up to head coach, he decided to maximize his resources. Loehding, his strongest player, would better serve the team by moving from linebacker and fullback, where he was a standout as a junior, to the offensive and defensive lines

In other words, step out of the spotlight and into the trenches.

“I approached him through a team aspect,” Whitney said. “I asked him how important it was to him for us (as a team) to be as successful as we can. He said he’d do anything to help the team. I told him what we were considering, that because of his strength and because of the depth we have at some positions and lack of depth we have at others, we would like to take a look at him there.”

It’s difficult to ask a football player to change positions at the end of their career, and Whitney said he was careful in his approach.

“He didn’t bat an eye and went forward with it,” he said. “He’s a kid who just loves to play football and hasn’t missed a beat. It was nice to have that reaction.”

Behind that unflinching accommodation to the team was a sincere disappointment.

“I was kind of bummed out about it at first, but I figured I’d give it a try and that the coaches knew what they were doing,” Loehding said. “They probably were going to put me there for a good reason.

“I wanted to lead our team, in my last year, the best that I could.”

A year ago, Loehding’s role was to make opponents respect the Eagles’ inside running game with quick-hitting dive plays. Now he’s at the epicenter, starting at guard. Before, he was a running back – a player who could hear his name called over the stadium loudspeaker system several times a game. Now he’s one of the unsung heroes of offensive football, a player who begins each play in a crouch and typically ends it under a pile of other players.

“It’s been different and I’m still getting used to everything,” Loehding said. “But, overall, it was good for the team. It’s worked out and I like the positions they’re having me play.

“The coaches recognize and acknowledge what I’ve done and other people have talked to me about it. They’ve encouraged me.”

Loehding has been a stalwart on a defense that has risen to each week’s challenge. Moving to a position opposite the opponent’s strength week-to-week, Loehding has played defensive end, defensive tackle and linebacker, depending on the team’s needs against a given opponent. From those starting points, he has amassed 70 tackles, forced four fumbles and sacked the quarterback seven times going into Friday’s homecoming game against East Valley.

“He’s just been a warrior for us,” Whitney said. “He’s worked really hard. He’s been in the weight room – strength-wise, he’s our strongest kid.

“In the long run, this will help us. We want to develop great athletes at the lineman positions. That’s really what it takes; you can’t just put the big guys down there just because they’re big guys. I think A.J. making this move will help, because he was one of our top returning kids and shows our younger kids. Here’s a senior who changed positions to help the team.”

The question that floats around in the back of Loehding’s mind, however, is whether or not helping the team sacrificed his own chances of playing college football.

“That’s been my dream, my highest-level dream,” he said. “I don’t know if this is going to affect my big dream. It’s going to be hard for my family to afford for me to go to college without a football scholarship. I’m just going to have to wait and see how this all plays out.”

What a prospective college coach gets in a player like Loehding are categorized as “intangible.”

At 6-foot-2 and 210 pounds, he’s not the biggest player on the field, but there’s no way to measure the size of a player’s heart.

“All I can say to a prospective college coach is that he won’t find a player who works harder than I do,” he said.

Or one more willing to sacrifice to help the team.