A Look Back at my Short-Lived Sub-Varsity Football Career

Many people I know, close friends included, don't realize that I even played high school football, much less that I played for perhaps the worst team imaginable. This might be an exaggeration, but not as much of one as you would think: the Newark Academy Minutemen finished their 1996 campaign with a record of 1-8. They failed to score a single point until the sixth game of the season, which they eventually lost by a score of 30-6. They did beat Sussex Tech though - by a lot, let the record show - so there was at least some distance between the Minutemen and the bottom of the barrel.

This was my freshman year of high school. (I only attended Newark Academy for that one year, before returning to public school as a sophomore.) I practiced with the varsity team that season - not because I was unusually talented, or strong, or fast, but because there simply weren't enough players to field a J.V. team, and there were no other options. The upshot was that I didn't feel any obligation to care about my team's record: since I barely played, I was in no way responsible for its fortunes. Losses only really affected me personally insomuch as they tended to weaken morale and increase the length and difficulty of practices. Sure, I rooted for my team from the sidelines, but I wasn't overly upset when we got routed - which happened pretty frequently. After we lost to Chatham (my former school), I got chewed out by our senior captain for blithely flirting with some of the opposing cheerleaders, instead of looking appropriately bummed out.

I see that N.A. Football apparently finished with a record of 3-6 this year. Good for them!

More than rooting for a team victory, I rooted for a lopsided score one way or the other, so that I would have a chance of getting into the game. The more action I saw, the more hope I would have of earning a highly-coveted varsity letter, a truly rare accomplishment for a freshman. Most of our games were in fact blowouts, meaning that I often took the field for a late-game kickoff, or even a full defensive series. The team was so thoroughly outclassed by Montclair Immaculate that I ended up playing most of the fourth quarter. In the closing minutes, I even notched a tackle of their star tailback, which made it difficult to stifle a grin as we got back on the bus following a 42-0 drubbing.

The Minutemen were on my mind last week, when I realized that twenty years had passed since my first and last season of high school ball. Specifically, I found myself thinking about the last game of the season, the Thanksgiving game against Montclair Kimberley Academy - one of the only contests I didn't enter, since it came down to the wire. At the half, we were up 21-0. We would go on to lose 24-21. I remember our seniors openly sobbing on the sidelines as time expired. They had just led their team to a 1-8 finish, but to me, they were larger than life heroes, and it was jarring to see them so broken.

In the end, I didn't earn that varsity letter, which was kind of bullshit. I had practiced with the varsity since two-a-days back in August, and I had seen action in six of nine total games. But at the Varsity Letter Assembly, held in front of the entire school in early December, I found my name along with the names of the other freshman grunts, listed under "Sub-Varsity." I haven't heard that term since, and I remember thinking that someone had invented it specifically so they wouldn't have give me a varsity letter. Twenty years later, I've turned out fine, and I'm well aware that it really, really doesn't matter any more, but even as I'm recounting this, I feel my blood pressure rising slightly.