The past week of football practice was a pretty good one for the varsity football team. As we play teams each week we try to remember that we are not just playing a certain team—we are playing ourselves.

Going into the game we decided that a one or two touchdown win over Philipsburg would not make the grade for the football team . We had to go out onto the field and show that we had improved since the 28-6 win over Huntingdon the week before. If we did that, we were pretty confident that we would win convincingly over Philipsburg even though they were a much improved team since their 2012 campaign.

Coach Gummo—one of the line coaches—has a step-brother that plays for the Mounties and throughout the week he was telling the line of some possible trash talk coming from the P-O locker room. This served as some motivation for us through the week while we tried to improve our game and get better.

The big message during the pre-game speech that was delivered by Coach Oliver was that we are extremely lucky to be playing the great game of football—but we never know what play might be our last. This especially goes for the seniors on the team because we know that all it takes is one play to receive an injury that knocks us out for the rest of the year. For the majority of us that do not plan on playing football in college, that would mean that a torn ACL for instance would finish our football careers. Coach Oliver spoke about a player that had passed away in high school years earlier (his picture is now hanging in our locker room at Gray Field) and how that player would love to be in any one of our shoes to play another game of football in the orange in black—the speech was a very moving one indeed.

Once out on the field, we did what we felt we needed to do by having the game decided at halftime. The second half had some great moments when certain guys on the team got the opportunity to take some snaps during a varsity game.

Now it is onto our next week of continuing to get better before we head to Bellefonte Friday night.