SACCO: Not mad, just disappointed

By Jim Sacco

Published: September 26, 2008

STUARTS DRAFT

It was wet.

It was muddy.

It was football played in conditions that would have made Bear Grylls decide to stay home in front of the fire. It was the perfect opportunity for the Cougars, coming off a big loss to Harrisonburg last week, to prove to their coach they were mudders.

They didn’t prove anything. And none of that went unnoticed by Rod Bowers, the kind of coach who, as cliché as it sounds, doesn’t put a stake into wins and losses, but how the team plays and how the players handle themselves.

Sure, Bowers says, wins and losses are for the fans and slack-jawed sports scribes. But if there’s one thing Bowers has made clear, it’s that he wants to see hard work day in and day out. He wants to see class.

What he doesn’t want to see is complacency — something he saw to his heart’s discontent more than enough Friday to have the mild-mannered coach raise his voice slightly above the usual whisper-from-the-pulpit media sessions he gives on the field after games.

So much was different this time for the Cougars’ third-year coach. Maybe he was out of his comfort zone, forced off the field after the final whistle by lightning and a steady downpour and having to deal with the media in a cavernous weight room inside the Nibco Field House. Forced to comment on his team within ear-shot of the hoots, hollers and high-fives coming from the victorious Spotswood team in the adjacent locker room.

“Did we need this win emotionally?” he asks in response to a question. Leaning against some get-Army-strong weight apparatus, he doesn’t have to think too hard or long.

“No.

“I’m more concerned about [if we] are playing hard. Are we executing?” he says. “What people from the outside in don’t realize is when all those little things are taken care of, winning is a by-product of that. We don’t need to be winning …”

A pause.

“We need to be improving.”

And what Bowers saw in Draft’s wet-and-woeful 7-0 loss to Spotswood wasn’t improvement on the offensive side of the ball. It was regression. It was watching a team that in three years has taken two steps forward suddenly decide to take three back. It was mindboggling. It wasn’t the rain from the heavens. But something was wrong upstairs, namely in the players’ heads.

“Offensively, we were really bad,” Bowers says. “We were in formations that I’ve never seen before. That I don’t understand.”

If a head coach can’t recognize a formation his team is running, that’s not a good thing.

“That’s something coach Bowers will get worked out,” he says, raising his voice just a little bit.

There’s work to be done in Stuarts Draft, a team that can’t ride last season’s surprise success back into the Region III stratosphere. Instead, it’s almost back to the drawing board for a team that, Bowers suggests, believes it can “just go out there on Friday and get the job done.”

But it can’t.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into some of them,” he says. “But that goes back on the kids — they have to take responsibility.”

For the first time since last season’s unsportsmanlike win over Wilson Memorial, Bowers looked like an angry parent — scratch that — a parent that’s not mad at you, but just really disappointed in you.

“I thought we were pretty good mudders,” he says. “And we didn’t mud tonight.”

Among other things.