On Friday, Sept. 22 the PCM football team was scheduled to play a district football game at Union Community High School in La Porte City, Iowa. Shortly after pregame warm-ups lightning struck and postponed the game for 20 minutes, that would be the beginning of an hour and 6 minute period before the game was officially suspended until Monday, Sept. 25. I am a player on that team and I am going to tell you, with the help of some of my teammates, what we spent our time doing in that 66 minute period.
As soon as we all got in the locker room and sat down Coach Bonnett addressed the team and said we were under delay. This was annoying as we were antsy to play and had already finished warming up.
“When the delay started we were all just kind of sitting around wanting this (game) to get started again,” Junior Cutler VandeLune said. “But as it went on we kind of loosened up because it felt like we weren’t gonna play.”
I was just sitting on the floor and whenever we looked out the window there was lightning every half second it seemed like. But it had quit raining and slowly some players made their way outside.
“So we got a little bored so we went outside and played some music in the rain,” Senior Mark Bussan said. “Eventually someone came up with the bright idea to run a (tackling drill).” All the players were in a circle surrounding junior Evan VanDonselaar and sophomore Harrison Brinegar.
How we set the drill up was there was no football and they lay on their back and when someone says go they get up and try and tackle each other.
“So we’re in this big circle with some banger music playing and we’re all just going crazy,” Bussan said. “But we left the end of the circle open and some of the Union players were outside and watching as we struck fear in them.” The small group of Union players were probably hardly intimidated by the events that were happening in front of them, as we were just losing our minds and having fun more than striking fear in them. Shortly after that started an outright downpour of rain so we all had to rush inside. We gathered in the gym for a short amount of time before we were informed the game was canceled and moved to Monday.
It was really unfortunate that we couldn’t play on Friday, as we were looking forward to playing in a muddy mess. But some great memories were made as a result of it, and that’s what matters most.
