THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 24, 1994 TAG: 9408230049
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 210 lines
THREE BUSLOADS of recruits eased through the security gate at Fleet Combat Training Center Dam Neck a few days ago, drew their linens and checked into Barracks 516.
For the next week, home-sweet-freaking-home would be a cinder-block-and-linoleum nightmare that only the military could love: short-term housing for transient sailors.
The pure beauty, though, is that a place like Barracks 516 allows no distraction from the task at hand. At Dam Neck, that usually involves training in advanced naval weapons systems.
But the three busloads of young recruits were from Virginia Beach's new high school, Ocean Lakes. They were there to learn football.
Through the week, it would become apparent that teaching football to high school guys is something like teaching them to use advanced weapons systems, but much more frightening.
They had exactly three weeks to go from a meandering gang of sandlot players into something resembling a team ready to take on a fast, deep and experienced Princess Anne squad on opening night.
On opening night, only the players can cross the white line. The coaches stay on the bench.
By Sept. 1, they had to be a team.
Ocean Lakes is Virginia Beach's 10th high school. It's an awesome glass-and-brick structure not far from the Dam Neck base, in one of those Virginia Beach regions that looks as if the whole neighborhood had been built between midnight and 5 a.m. last Thursday.
For all its amenities, though, Ocean Lakes did not come with a built-in football team.
Head coach Jim Prince, who came to Ocean Lakes after five years at Cox High School, was dealing against a stacked deck. Of his about 50 players, just six are seniors, and only a couple have experience. Ten or so more are juniors, leaving him a roster tilted toward ninth- and 10th-graders. Maybe one in four, Prince figured, had ever played organized ball.
Ocean Lakes was put together by pulling kids from five middle schools and four other high schools. Few of Prince's squad even knew one another.
Turning this anonymous mob into a team would call for drastic action. The brass at Dam Neck, figuring this was going to be their neighborhood school, decided to adopt Ocean Lakes as the home team. They cut a lot of red tape, loosely interpreted a few military rules and invited the whole squad onto the base for a weeklong intensive football camp.
This was summer camp with a brutal edge. Nobody would be gathering at the ol' campfire to toast marshmallows and sing ``Kum-ba-ya.'' Breakfast was at 7 a.m., and everybody had to be on the field at 8, in full gear, for the first of three daily practices. They'd still be on the field in the evening, running drills until the players or the sun just couldn't stay up any longer.
Lights-out was 10:30. Then it would start all over again.
The ``Big Dog'' knew what was coming before the whistle sounded. They were doing a live blocking drill, and he'd flubbed it again, wound up with his face mooshed into the mud by a guy half his size.
Morgan Roane, the massive defensive coach, bent over the struggling pile of flesh and screamed through the ear-hole in the kid's helmet. ``JEEZ, BIG DOG, I'VE SEEN 110-POUNDERS COME OFF THE BALL HARDER THAN THAT!''
The development of Sonny ``Big Dog'' Owens was something of a signpost for the evolution of the whole Ocean Lakes football team. Four days into the Dam Neck boot camp he was penciled in as starting nose guard. Back on that first day, when they'd put on their shoulder pads for the first time, there was reason to wonder if he'd make it at all.
That first day they'd set out at a jog for the practice field, nearly half a mile from Barracks 516. After just a couple of blocks, the Big Dog was falling behind. It was 93 degrees and he was losing ground fast, scrubbing along like some massive Hershey's kiss melting away under a killing 3 o'clock sun.
Any process of creation has moments of beauty. One of the first moments for the Ocean Lakes squad came when two teammates glanced back and saw Big Dog struggling. They peeled away from the pack, pulled up at his side and urged him on. One of them took him lightly by the elbow, helping him dig down and tough it out.
But that was four days ago. Coach Roane's scream was still echoing through Big Dog's helmet as he rolled over, got up one knee at a time and planted himself over the ball. They came at his hole again, and the Big Dog dropped the hammer. There was a ferocious clanging of pads and helmets, and huge chunks of turf flew.
This time when the whistle blew, the Big Dog was on top, and it was the other guys picking Virginia mud out of their face masks.
You can tell a TV football announcer is from another era if he talks about players ``trading leather,'' the WHOOMP sound that came when two of them hit head-on. Helmets and shoulder pads haven't been made of leather in decades, and the sounds are different now.
Those first couple of days, the sounds of the Ocean Lakes team hitting one another were tentative, a click or a clatter of high-impact plastic coming together at low speed. But after three or four days of getting banged around, some of the boys were beginning to bang back.
The squad was broken down into four or five groups, everybody going about their training, when a screaming KRR-A-A-A-A-A-CK split the air. It sounded like lightning had hit nearby.
All the coaches' heads snapped around, and Mike Banks, the line coach, stood over a twisted mound of arms and legs screaming, ``BEAUTIFUL, CHRIS, THAT WAS ABSOLUTELY FREAKIN' BEAUTIFUL.''
Others picked up the pace. Guys who lacked bulk but made up for it in speed and guts started hitting like a runaway freight, trying to duplicate that sound, that pistol-shot KRR-A-A-A-ACK of the pads.
Number 42. Number 11. Number 45. Number 5. They seemed to be in silent competition to see who could get to the ball fastest, hit the hardest, get up with the most mud on his jersey.
They'd begun the week moving as aimlessly as pigeons in the park. Now they were beginning to prowl in unison, like a nasty pack of stray dogs.
They were beginning to look like a team.
The mood around Barracks 516 had changed, too.
Buildings like Barracks 516 were designed by people with secret Stalinist leanings: Two-story stacked rectangles, one hall straight down the middle of each. Interior walls are lockers that cut the barracks into four-plexes. Each four-plex has exactly two sets of metal bunk beds, one round table and a couple of chairs.
Everything was painted in a color best described as off-bland. The furniture was designed by a committee of chiropractors anxious to drum up a little business.
Stuffed in there night and day, catching a quick nap or a few hands of cards between practices, running their muddy laundry through the washer/dryer before muddying it worse at the next practice, it didn't take long for everyone to get acquainted.
A law of physics determines that any gathering of 50 teenagers will produce no fewer than 45 boom boxes. Rock and rap clashed in the air. So did Right Guard spray and triple-mongo-jungle-strength mosquito repellent. (There was a suspicion that Dam Neck is the proving grounds for a new naval weapon, a strain of laser-aimed, wire-guided, heat-seeking super-skeeters that can pierce a rhino's hide and suck it drier than a sack full of sand.)
Still and all, the food was pretty good. Everybody knew why they were there. Nobody whined.
On the last day of practice, somebody was asking if the squad was any different from when they'd piled into Barracks 516 a week before.
``Yeah,'' said Shawn Jennings, No. 55, a center/linebacker. ``We've got unity.
``We've been locked up in those barracks with everybody, listening to each other, even listening to each other complain, listening to each other snore. This team works together like a unit.''
``Those first few days,'' said Sheron Joseph, No. 7, a running back, ``I was ready to go home. Only knew a few of these guys. Now I know everybody. And I've learned a lot. A lot.''
They're going to learn a lot more, and much of it will be rude. Common sense and recent history dictate that the Ocean Lakes Dolphins are going to get whomped all over the field. Tallwood High went through this process a couple of years ago and didn't win a game their first season.
Ocean Lakes has every problem a football team can have: too young, too small, too raw, too thin on the bench. Their starting quarterback, Walter Amos, is just a freshman, though he moves with a confidence that makes him seem years older - he wears jersey No. 1 - and already he's emerging as a team leader.
At the end of their last Dam Neck practice, on the day when they were to turn in their linens, pile onto the three yellow buses and head back home, coach Jim Prince whistled the team together. Fifty muddy kids, each on one knee, everybody quiet.
The afternoon session hadn't gone well. They all knew it.
``You know I don't lie to you,'' Coach Prince said, ``so let me say straight up, this was a bad practice.''
The coach told them they'd have a lot of struggles down the road, a lot of times they'd have to reach deep and rally every bit of courage they could find.
``You've gotta keep on fighting,'' he said, ``keep on believing. Do not fall prey to outside sources who say what you're supposed to be or what you're not supposed to be.
``You've got to realize that everything in life has to do with attitude, how you react.
``Only 10 percent of what you will be is decided by what happens to you. Everything else, that other 90 percent, is decided by how you react to what happens to you.''
It could be 10, 15, even 20 years before the boys on that field get a full sense of what Jim Prince tried to teach them that day. It had little to do with trap blocks, coverage patterns and blind-option pitches.
Life ain't fair. Sooner or later, life makes an underdog of just about every one of us. Life will often reduce you to a bloody, bruised, muddy pile of insect-ridden flesh.
But if you keep getting back up, if you fight back hard enough and long enough, sooner or later you'll win a few. It will be sweet, it will taste good. o< And once you've learned that lesson, nothing can keep you down. ILLUSTRATION: Photos by Christopher Reddick
Lighthearted moments were few during the camp, but
quarterback/cornerback Kevin Schweichler had a laugh during warmup.
Ocean Lakes High School head coach Jim Prince leads his receivers in
a drill during practice at Fleet Combat Training Center Dam Neck,
where newly organized football squad spent a week getting acquainted
with each other and with the rigors of a sport in which most of the
them had very little experience.
Above: Nose guard Sonny "Big Dog" Owens hits a blocking dummy during
a drill and winds up on the ground.
Left: Tackle Paul Fraga fell asleep with his playbook beside him
after a late afternoon practice. The team stayed in the barracks at
Dam Neck.
Walter Amos is the starting quarterback for the Ocean Lakes although
he is only a freshman.
Julio Gavino (23) leads cheers from the sidelines for teammates on
the field during a scrimmage.
Running back Marlon Todd can't find the handle on a pass thrown to
him during the scrimmage with Ferguson High.
Coach Prince tells the team after the scrimmage that although they
were outplayed, they will become a better team if they have the
desire,
by CNB