SACCO: Waynesboro needs some heart

By Jim Sacco

Published: August 29, 2008

Everybody forms a circle around the man they call, “Coach,” and “Sir,” with their eyes wide open and mouths slammed shut.
They listen. No fancy speeches from Little Giants coach Steve Isaacs, just the facts as he paces back and forth, hands on his hips in the center of a smelly old gym adjacent to the field.
“If you need me, nine minutes before kickoff, to give some sage advice,” Isaacs says, “We’re in trouble.”
The team gets fired up.
“You know it coach,” replies running back Steven Brown. “Yes sir.”
Then the bottom drops out. An interception thrown on the first play from scrimmage and four plays later, Western Albemarle punches its way into pay dirt and it’s as good as done.
So is life in a Waynesboro football jersey, a program that has been beat up by the other teams, fellow students in the hallways and a community hungry for just a sniff of a .500 season.
Isaacs sees it. He knows it. And it hurts him.
That’s why his eyes fill up and his voice breaks ever so slightly as he talks at midfield after the 39-6 loss to his old team from over the hump. With Jeremy Sweet standing next to him like a one-man posse, Isaacs wonders aloud what the problem is, finally coming to a conclusion as the players file out, heads hanging.
“They outcoached us and they outplayed us,” he says. “And they probably outcoached us more than they outplayed us.”
He takes the blame.
Tired, he says, of seeing kids beaten up by their peers after every loss and wondering why that fire is snuffed after one bad play. A problem that leads to bigger problems and, on a humid August night in the River City, became the first time during the Isaacs’ era that the Little Giants were flat out embarrassed by a foe.
“This is the most talented group of players I’ve had,” Isaacs says. Then he falls silent. Something is missing. Something just isn’t going right.
How can a team go from ready to take on the world to wanting to crawl under the stands in a matter of minutes? How can team go from the boiling point to 26 points down in one half?
Isaacs isn’t a shepherd and he’s not in the business of pulling wool over anybody’s eyes. When he can’t put his finger on it, how can you expect anybody else?
Brown, looking just as beaten as his coach, has a few ideas.
“One little mess up on offense and it messed the whole offense up,” Brown says, before lifting a single finger to drive the point home. “One little thing.”
The problem on the field is a simple one. Not one based on lack of talent or inability to learn. Brown, who like it or not has to be one of the horses this team rides to respectability, doesn’t have to think long or hard about it.
He looks tired. Not from the game, but from the thumpings taking place on the field instead of resonating out of the players’ chests.
“Heart. Heart. We need heart,” he says. “It’s missing. We mess up a play and we get down on ourselves and there’s nothing we can do to get back up.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Maybe it’s time the Little Giants figure out something. Respectability, after all, is what’s on the line and that can go a long way.