Round Lake aims to keep the wins coming
History is selling.
And the players on the 2018 Round Lake football team aren't buying.
History says that Round Lake is supposed to struggle at football. This is a program that has won 45 games in the last 23 years for an average of 1.9 wins per season. There have been 3 winless seasons and 10 1-win seasons over that period.
Classmates around school usually don't expect much, and sometimes even antagonize the football players with jeers and jokes. Football around town usually doesn't draw much attention.
So why believe that history won't keep repeating itself?
"My brother (Mauricio) went to Round Lake. He was an offensive lineman and he was on a lot of losing teams," Round Lake sophomore running back Dominick Tovar said. "But me and my friends, as soon as we got here, we said, 'We are going to change this.'"
Tovar and his buddies are off to a good start.
The Panthers got one of their most exciting wins in recent memory last weekend by putting a running clock (the lead reaches 40 points) on Maine East in a 50-12 victory.
It was the first running clock in Round Lake's favor since 2002.
"That was big for the program," said Round Lake junior wide receiver Kevonne Peterson, who caught 3 touchdown passes against Maine East and has 4 on the season. "That really brought us together as a team."
The Panthers have been working on team chemistry. After all, they've got a ton of young and new faces this season.
Round Lake starts eight sophomores. And three of the team's key players are either brand new or relatively new to the community. Peterson transferred in this year from Burlington, Iowa, sophomore quarterback Isaiah Nixon is originally from Grayslake, and running back Remorrian Gordon, who ran for 2 long touchdowns last week, came to Round Lake from North Chicago.
But head coach Cristo Garza sees all that turnover as a positive. Especially when it comes to the task of changing minds and perceptions.
He thinks that young players and new players are less likely to be bogged down in the program's history of losing. In other words, they don't buy the idea that Round Lake is supposed to struggle at football because history says so. They expect to win like they did in youth football or in middle school and they are too new and too young to know any better or any differently.
"These kids that we have this year don't want to hear about Round Lake's past in football," Garza said. "They just want to compete and win."
The sophomore class is especially confident that can happen. As freshmen last year, that group went 6-3.
"There's an air of confidence with those youngsters," Garza said.
The sophomores are led by Nixon, who scored 4 touchdowns last week against Maine East. He passed for 3 touchdowns and ran for another.
While growing up in Grayslake, Nixon played youth football for Warren Township and then came to Round Lake as a freshman. He hasn't been around long enough to be jaded by Round Lake's history in football.
"If you're in a winning program, a lot of times you just think you're going to win and you play with that kind of confidence," Nixon said. "Sometimes it's hard to change that in a program that hasn't had a lot of winning. But a lot of us believe we can win, and it starts with the way we practice. We try to practice hard to give us confidence in ourselves. Winning isn't easy, but it's even harder when you don't believe in yourself."
The Maine East victory wasn't just a victory on paper for the Panthers. It gave them so many reasons to believe in themselves because it didn't come easy, even though the running clock was enacted.
Weather wrecked havoc all over the north suburbs last Friday and the Round Lake-Maine East game was delayed for approximately 90 minutes while thunderstorms and lightning passed through.
The Panthers played their best football after that tedious and distracting delay.
"That doesn't happen at Round Lake," Garza said. "Normally some kind of adversity like that would have knocked us on our butts. But these kids have risen to the occasion. I'm not even sure they know how good they can be yet."
But the players say that what they do know is that they are far better than how they performed in their 20-7 Week 1 loss to Proviso East.
"We just had a huge chip on our shoulder to win that game (against Maine East) because we didn't like the way we played (against Proviso East)," Gordon said. "We knew we needed to work harder in practice (leading up to the Maine East game), and we did. This is a group that expects to win. This is a group that really believes that it's time to make a change at Round Lake and we're going to do it. We don't listen to people who talk about losing. We know what we can do. When people doubt us, it just makes us work harder and it pushes us even more.
"Coach (Garza) tells us all the time that people will doubt us. But this is a new team and a new year and you never know what can happen."
All the young, new, upbeat Panthers know is that history is their least favorite subject this year.
pbabcock@dailyherald.com
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