Winning When They Say Your Losing

10/31/07 by John Nash, Stamford Times

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Kevin Jones looked at the faces of the young men in front of him and understood what this night meant to them.

He saw their smiles and he sensed their relief. And he felt, at least in his heart, that the rest of this 2007 high school football season would have a new feel to it.

The Stamford High School Black Knights, up until Friday night, had been stuck in the gridiron version of Hell on Turf. No matter how hard they worked, no matter what they did right, something would happen to change the tide, and force feed them another loss. Defeats were constantly, it seemed, being snatched from the jaws of victory.

They started the season oh-and-one, quickly went oh-and-two and kept going oh-no-not-again all the way until they were oh-and-six and wondering what was going to happen next.
What did happen last Friday night, though, was something none of them would soon forget. What happened next was a road trip to Fairfield Ludlowe.

"If you think you're going to lose all your games, you might as well stop coaching," said Jones, who has been in charge of the Black Knights program for six years. "We play every game to win. But this season had been such a disappointment because this group of kids we have is a really good group of kids. From my view point, I wanted them to win for them. They've worked so hard."

Against Ludlowe, that win finally happened — a stunning 22-16 victory that seemed to be the antithesis of the Knights entire season.

Trailing by two points with 1:39 left on the clock and 74 yards away from a miracle, Stamford marched down the field in 10 plays. Quarterback T.J. Mills, who lost his grandmother the week of the game and had tossed a pair of first-half interceptions, clinched the drive by hitting Josh Maignan for a 4-yard score with 15 seconds left in the game.

Finally, Stamford had its first win and exorcised the demons of what had become a season of frustration.

"It was good to get the proverbial monkey off our back," Jones said. "We had played in so many tight games and came up on the short end of things so often. We're a talented football team, but we played a buzz-saw of a schedule. Every game, we'd look up at the scoreboard and see we were only down two, or by down by three or down by four. We were always so close."

On the scoreboard, the wins for Stamford have been few and far between over the past two seasons.

The Knights, 2-8 a year ago, are 1-6 heading into this week's game against mighty Greenwich, the second-ranked team in the state. Chances are, they'll be 1-7 come Saturday.

But as anybody who has ever been close to a football program will tell you, sometimes victories come in a different and — in reality — a far more important fashion.

Jones knows that such a thing even happens at his own school, too.

"Listen, one of the things about a place like Stamford High, is we're so diverse — we're like the United Nations," he said. "The biggest thing we do every year is we're able to take guys who don't look like each other and who don't live like each other and we bring them together and we go out and try to win ball games.

"We haven't had a lot of success lately," Jones adds, "but we've had tremendous success in the past and we'll have more in the future. Right now, though, there are three more games left for this family to stick together and have fun."

Sounds like a winning team to me.

— John Nash is The Stamford Times sports editor. He can be reached at johnnash@thestamfordtimes.com or by phone at 354-1051.