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The RHS football team started out to a rough start going four straight winless games. The football team had a roller coaster ride of a season with many starters getting hurt, and needing the younger players to step up.
Reading High football began when last season finished. We got right to work in the weight room getting big for this season. We were in the weight room for a strong seven months. Within these months we had seven on seven competitions against other schools in which we did exceptionally well. As a team we then went to a team camp at West Chester where we did more seven on seven's and the lineman did drills against other schools.
At this camp we also had team practices where we went over plays. After the camp we went right into two a days where we filtered out the "rift-raft". After that was over, the real challenge began. We then found ourselves staring toe to toe against the first ranked team in the state, Harrisburg! We held ourselves well. We then found ourselves in week one against York where we lost 6-0 in OT, which was a heartbreaker. We had a lot of chances, however, we just could not seize them.
As weeks went by it was the same story: we just could not produce points on offense. At one point, it just started clicking like Coach Brown told us it would as we finally got a big wind against Penn Manor in week five.
Throughout these weeks we had a lot of key injuries that affected us. Malcolm Williams separated his shoulder, Corey Baldwin had a hip flexor injury, Chadd Baldwin had a dislocated shoulder, and Frank Parker-Stewert was out with torn ligaments in his shoulder.
Throughout the season we've all had our own little injuries, but we still continued to play. We had several players step up into the light and take the role in which we hoped they would.
Throughout the whole season it was hard to keep seeing an L after a game when we would think about how hard we worked. We had to hear it every week from the TV, paper, online, and even our peers.
I look back at what we had we were physically great at every position even though some people could not overcome the mental stress. It is hard to look at the seniors on the football team who are graduating this year and watch them leave with a losing record because they worked too hard in their life to end up in this situation. It could have ended in so many different ways. They deserved so much more. As Coach Brown tells us, "If it was easy everyone would be doing it."
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