Coach Biles gave us Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday off of practice after losing to Dayton. I was confused as to why we were getting so many days off during a 3 game losing skid. Anyway, I get a call on Tuesday night from a guy in Texas. He says he is the owner of our team because H.P. Patterson was just leasing it from him. He tells me on the phone that our coaches are going to quit on Wednesday at practice. This guy is Steve Reape. His dad is the owner of the Beaumont team that we beat a few weeks back.
Needless to say on Wednesday at practice, there is no practice but only a meeting where Coach Biles and Coach Ax resign. Coach Ax was pretty shaken up about it and had to leave the room after only about a minute speech; you could tell it was really hard on him to leave our team. The reason why they left is because Coach Biles had to go through so much crap cleaning up this whole H.P. Patterson deal. (It turns out H.P. is a real con man who has been screwing people for years, here is a news story about H.P. that aired down in Miami on Thursday night if you want to watch. http://cbs4.com/bios/local_bio_080155717.html The Invisible Car story)
Anyway, Coach Biles was doing too much cleaning up and maintaining and wasn't doing any coaching at all. A former NFL coach doesn't need to be going through that stress. So the team understood why the staff had to leave the team. There were no hard feelings and Coach Biles left on a good note hugging and shaking players hands as he left. He also got a Gatorade bath on his way out.
In the middle of all this, our equipment manager has taken all of our equipment and we don't know where it is.
Right after Coach Biles left, we, the players, called a meeting. We had to just get together and regroup to make sure that no one was going anywhere, because we were still very much in the playoff hunt. Some players vented their frustrations others spoke about hope. We knew we were still going to Fayetteville on Friday for the game on Saturday.
Now rumors are flying around that our equipment manager is holding our equipment ransom until he gets his money the organization owes him. I tried to talk to him and say that it is not the team that owes him the money but the old owner H.P. Why punish the team by taking their equipment, when it is the owner's fault, who is probably in Mexico on the beach? Later he would say that H.P. told him to collect the equipment, or he would hold him accountable. Anyway...
The next day I get a call from Megan (our only person in the front office beside the owner) and she asked if I could get Cov Cath's (my high school) field for practice. So now not only do we not have coaches or equipment, now we don't have a place to practice. This is just going awesome. You can't write a better script to this folks!!! This would be perfect for a reality T.V. series. Cue the theme music, (cue voice over announcer) "Everything goes perfect for the first 6 games, then the shirt hits the fan, the team finds out the owner blew all his money, AND IS A KNOWN CRIMINAL, his name isn't even H.P. Patterson, team starts to lose games, then the coaches walk from the team.... What will the team do? Will they fold? Will they turn their season around? Find out on the new reality hit T.V. series "Marshals - The Season."
Back to what really happened...
Practice that night was at Cov Cath; I pulled some strings and got us a practice field. The offense went over our plays and the defense went over their schemes. There isn't much to do without any coaches or equipment. At the end of practice, Coach, I mean Owner Steve comes back with our equipment. Is he our savior? Everything is set, we have our equipment and we are to leave the next morning at noon for Fayetteville. No coaches, just our owner Steve, Megan, our trainer Bob, and players. We got 4 vans. One Astro van, one conversion van, one 15-passenger van, and one Ford Freestar.
However, about an hour after practice I get a call from Megan saying that we have to be at the Arena now at 11 because the sheriff's department has to take inventory of our equipment because of all the legal battles going on between, old owner H.P. Patterson and U.S. Bank. I think to myself, "No big deal, we are still to leave at noon everything is fine."
The next morning we get to the Arena at 10:45 and I'm one of the first people there. At this point I don't know what to think I'm just riding a wave of confusion. So only about 15 of our 22 players show up to show the cops our equipment. It turns out that the cops aren't even checking our equipment it is just their attorney. So we get all our stuff out including our team stuff. The attorney looked at the equipment for about 1 minute and 17 seconds and barely counted anything. So now we are told we can pack our equipment back up. So we do and we wait while Steve and the attorney's do some paper work so we can take our equipment and be on our way to Fayetteville.
A bunch of the players decided that while we wait for the paper work to be done we are going to head over to Willie's Sports Café and get some food before we leave. It's about 1pm now when we start eating. We call back to the Arena and they said it would be about 20 more minutes. 2pm hits and we are still at Willie's, we call back and it will be 20 more minutes. 3 pm hits and we are still at Willie's now they don't know how long it is going to take. Meanwhile all of us have eaten and we start to venture out in the parking lot. At about 3:30 we are given the word we are allowed to rollout but we have to stop back at the Arena to get Steve. Upon arrival at the Arena, Steve tells us that we are not allowed to take our equipment. We laugh and say, "Nice joke, let's roll."
It's not a joke. We can't take our equipment down to Fayetteville, but Steve has already called down there and we are supposed to have brand new equipment down there waiting for us. Now some of the players are starting to talk. Some of them are saying that they aren't going anymore because they don't want to play in other people's equipment, others are saying that it is 4pm and we haven't left yet we won't get in till extremely late. Now I got to stop telling the story here and give some of my opinion....
We are at a point beyond all reason. We have just entered chaos and turning the corner on crash and burn. We are thinking about driving down to Fayetteville, North Carolina in 4 vans in 12 hours, without any coaches and without any equipment. Are we crazy??? But let me tell you we don't play for the money, 200 bucks a game is all we get. And that is all we get, no incentives, no extra money, no endorsements. Some of our players have to support a family. Everyone has real jobs. I?m proud of our team for going against all reason and going down on faith in each other and faith in God. I think we took a step forward on that Friday for taking a chance. We easily could have just got in our cars and gone home, especially without any equipment, not to mention with no coaches.
Back to the story, so we left about 4:30. To add to the chaos, there was a fatal car accident on I-75, so we had to go a different way and now our directions are useless. We got a little lost on the way down but we got to the hotel just before 3:45am. Now I think to myself, "Now we are at the hotel, its time to get some sleep." No, it's not that easy. The Fayetteville front office has booked half of us in this hotel and 8 of the other players in a different hotel just a few miles down the street.
Me, Carpenter, Fry, and Perron get back into the van to follow Jourdo, Tobias, Mingo, Wilkens, Wyatte, and Megan who is driving. Parron is in the driver seat for us. Megan got directions from the front desk so we assume we know where she is going, remember its just "right down the street." Where you can see where this is going. So we drive down the street and its not there, so we turn around, again, again, and again. We are tired of driving, we are sleepy tired, and we are pissed about the whole situation. Parron is getting really mad at Megan and honks at her twice during the adventure. Carpenter is quietly pissed sitting shotgun, and Fry says some sarcastic comment in perfect 15-second intervals. I throw my two cents in every once in a while. We clearly have no idea where we are. Perron gives Fry his phone to dial 411 and get the hotel phone number. Fry is about to get the number from the operator and the phone says 'No service.' Haha, now this is just funny.
So I call up to the van in front to see what is going on. I talk to Jourdo and he doesn?t even say hi, just "I know it may seem like we don't know where we are, but we know now," I just start dying laughing, because he was totally serious. He says to Megan, "this is the road the hotel is on right here," so we turn and there is a silence over the phone and I hear, "Where in the hell are we?" We just turned on a dirt road! The hotel directions were wrong. Megan stops at a stop sign in the middle of a trailer park and doesn't move. Parron is so pissed so he honks, then me and Fry duck in case anybody comes out with a shotgun for honking at 4:15 in the morning 20 feet from about 6 trailers. Now there is a car behind us, so we pull back onto somewhat of a normal road. Parron spots a cop and whips our van over to ask for directions, something I suggested a long time ago. Then I realize that we just let the other van drive into the night. We get directions and start in the other direction, then Jourdo calls from the other van, "Are you guys still following us?" I laugh again, and tell them to follow us.
Once we got to the hotel and got situated my head hit the pillow for bed at 5am on a game night.
Again, I couldn't write a better script for this. I could be a reality T.V. star as we speak.
The story is not over yet, read the game day dramatics too.