I am a member of the Angry Jack football team and would like to share my experiences of this season. I'm gonna start off saying this season was nothing compared to last year and we could feel we would be better since the summer. Last year was my first year ever playing football and I generally liked it even though we had a 1-9 record. I came back this year to play and went to every summer workout and did a lot on my own too.
When we had got our new coaches many of us were nervous and really didn't want to play anymore. But then we heard the coach would be Steve Brown and we all stayed. In my opinion we have the best coaching staff in the state; they make us work, encourage us, talk with us and even give us lessons about life - not just football.
We all knew it was gonna be a good season, and we took off to our first 7 versus 7 of the year in Socorro. Many people expected the same Pirates from last year and then were surprised when we came and beat and tied very good teams. We kept practicing every day and eventually had a scrimmage in Gallup. We won against all three teams there and in total we only allowed one touchdown scored on us.
Again we got back to work and prepared for the season. Our first game was home against Capital. We ended up losing 33-17 after we were up at halftime. For our second game, it was Homecoming against Gallup. We won 56-0 by halftime! Our third game was against Bloomfield at home and we had a devastating loss, 60-7. The fourth game of the season, we finally traveled, but lost to Moriarty, 21-13.
At this point, many people had lost faith in us because we were 1-3 already, so they gave up and thought we were gonna stay the same. But we kept working harder and harder and for our fifth game we won 3518 against Hope Christian. Our sixth game, we traveled to Kirtland Central and got a huge win, 54-42. We then had our bye week and people saw our record was 3-3 and saw that we wanted to change something.
For week eight, we went to Taos and had an amazing game and won, 28-27. Everyone was excited and happy! We had a 3game win streak and we had more and more fans that supported us. Week nine, we played Silver at home and we were expecting a good game, but lost, 40-7. Again we knew we had to focus more and work harder at practice to fix things. And then for week ten, we traveled to Valencia and got a big district win, 35-21. For our last in-season game we played St. Pius X for our Senior Night. It was an amazing game and we ended up winning our second district game, 21-14, making our end season record 6-4 and getting distract runner up.
Everyone was happy and excited that we had made it to playoffs for the first time in years and got the No. 8 seed and were able to host a playoff game! Then something tragic happened to our team and community. William Archuleta had passed away on Halloween. Everyone was sad. He was an amazing kid, student, athlete and was gonna be an amazing father. With this, we all got a sticker in honor of Will on the back of our helmets and when we ran out for game time we carried his jersey. We played our hearts out but it didn't turn out the way the community expected - we lost in the first round playoffs, 35-7, against Albuquerque Academy at home to end our season.
But overall it was a great season.