OGDEN — There was 9:27 left on the game clock, but it would not be played.
St. Joseph, in its first-ever year as a football team, led the game 64-0. For the moment, people stood and players knelt waiting for Alejandro Resendez to get back up off the grass.
Resendez was one of just eight players comprising the second-year football team for the Utah Schools for the Deaf and the Blind Eagles. He wasn’t the first player knocked out of the game for USDB, but for the day, he would be the last. USDB’s head coach Austin Davis waved off the referees and signaled they would not continue. St. Joseph won the game 64-0.
This game, played on Sept. 23, marked the first meeting between what is currently the two newest football teams in the state of Utah, both of which are competing in the UHSAA’s eight-player division. It may not have looked like the prettiest picture, but for both teams that day, that Friday marked a period of real progress.
St. Joseph
For St. Joseph, the Jayhawks won their first game ever in school history. It was also their first homecoming football game. They had gotten close the week before in a 68-66 loss to Carlin, Nevada. The team’s success would build momentum to grab a second consecutive win, beating Monument Valley, 56-14, the following week.
“It’s really a unique, cool opportunity,” St. Joseph coach Jeramy Hunt-Loveless said of starting the Jayhawks program from the ground up. As a former member of the 1992 4A state championship team at Clearfield, Hunt-Loveless had been a veteran of coaching in both football and wrestling all around the state, with stops at Logan, Mountain Crest, Alta, Olympus, Brighton, Utah Military Academy and Northridge, but St. Joseph was his first opportunity at being a head football coach.
Funny enough, Hunt-Loveless didn’t have the possibility on his radar when he sent the school his resume while finalizing his teaching license at Weber State University. He’d vaguely heard at the time about St. Joseph wanting to start a football program.
During his interview process, it came up pretty quickly, and upon his hiring as a teacher, the administration immediately put him in charge of the soon-to-be inaugural school football team.
Hunt-Loveless soon found that this team, this program, was really something of a realized dream for the school community, giving him and his program an opportunity to “unite the community in Ogden through football.”
“The deep passion for football has been here a long time,” Hunt-Loveless said. “There’s been some failed attempts for 11-man but just not all the resources coming together to make it work.”
St. Joseph attempted to start a team in the UHSAA’s inaugural sanctioned eight-player classification in 2022, but challenges arose that deferred the school’s participation.
“I had a whole bunch of boys, like 18 boys, that wanted to play football,” Hunt-Loveless said. “After a couple days (worth) of practices, none of them wanted to play football, and we were even going really light.”
A few freshmen stuck around, Hunt-Loveless said, and they got friends of their own to show up and commit to the team, practices and all. The team missed out on playing in Week 1, and although the official MaxPreps roster lists 17 players, Hunt-Loveless said it’s more around 12. Against USDB, just three backups were available on the sideline.
In the last few weeks, the effects of commitment have begun to take hold. The Jayhawks are capable yet undeniably raw. Players are still getting accustomed to the sport and how things work playing the “ultimate team sport,” as Hunt-Loveless calls it. Some Jayhawks players would approach their coach midway through play calls and ask to jump to other positions for fun.
Against the Eagles, senior Roderick Richards III went off for 217 yards on just seven carries, scoring a touchdown on every carry. He went on to record five touchdowns and 101 yards on 10 carries against Monument Valley.
The eight-player division of the UHSAA has eight full participants. If the playoffs for that bracket started today, St. Joseph would be the No. 6 team.
USDB
For USDB, the progress was of a different kind. The small team, composed of just 10 players, has not yet won a game, but after an encouraging 48-20 loss to Altamont, the Eagles’ game against the Jayhawks marked the second game of the season to last until the final quarter.
Going into the game, USDB was already down one player due to injury, and another was out of uniform on the sidelines taking care of water and other needs. The Eagles entered the game, as they often have since their team was formed, looking to last as long as they could before injuries mounted up too high to continue.
USDB, unlike St. Joseph, did not begin football this season, having played last season. However, the Eagles only got to play four games last year, going 0-4, and opted not to play in the first round of the playoffs. It was a move likely made to avoid further unnecessary injury to the players, especially when the opponent would have been eventual champion Gunnison Valley.
“The team is getting better and better,” Brian Thornsberry said. “The communication’s getting better, the unity’s getting better. It’s just a new program in just our second year, and hopefully we get more kids to come play with us.”
USDB doesn’t just have deaf and hard-of-hearing players. It’s virtually the entire program. The team is run by a pair of co-head coaches, Austin Davis and Brian Thornsberry, who are both deaf. Athletic director Jonathan Helgesen is deaf. School principal Martin Price is deaf. The team communicates in American Sign Language to each other and works with a pair of interpreters to communicate with their opponents.
USDB comprises an array of schools ranging from Ogden down to St. George, and the institution itself has existed since 1884. Going back to the early 1900s, deaf schools in Utah have fielded sports teams and, yes, they even played football.
“Deaf sports have been around for a long time,” Thornsberry said. “Deaf sports are all over … USDB did have football in the past, and we are now bringing back the program and hope to grow and make it into a solid program in the future. It takes time to build a foundation and it takes students and the community to make it happen. We need to spread the word that deaf and hard-of-hearing students have an opportunity to play football.”
Although the team competes under the USDB moniker, likely in respect to the unified leadership of the deaf and the blind schools, only students from the schools for the deaf are involved. The team is based out of the Kenneth C. Burdett School of the Deaf in Ogden, but almost all of the players on the current team come from Salt Lake, Helgesen said.
When eight-player football was announced as a possibility with the UHSAA a few years ago, Helgesen said the school wasted little time in responding.
“We immediately polled the students and they were very interested in participating,” Helgesen said. “The cost to start up a football team was extensive. Fortunately, USDB receives funding from trust lands set aside for activities that enrich the lives of deaf, blind and deaf-blind students across the state. It was a lot of work to do, but we were able to get equipment, uniforms and a coaching team in place for the fall of 2022.”
Although in a somewhat limited fashion, the Eagles hit a significant milestone at the beginning by beating Monticello’s JV team, 36-6. It marked the first time they’ve won a game in any fashion. Outside of that, the team has focused most of its efforts on playing around the country against other deaf schools.
“Our favorite games are those against other deaf schools since there is a common language among all the players, coaches and referees,” Helgesen said.
Thornsberry said the team plans to have its own turf field for home games next season.
Helgesen said the Eagles are not planning on participating in the playoff this year, and it remains unclear as to when or if that will change.
Continued growth
In Week 9 of the season, both squads suffered losses. St. Joseph fell in a region shootout to Water Canyon, 50-30, while USDB took on one of the nation’s strongest deaf teams, Minnesota Academy for the Deaf, and lost, 60-0.
The Eagles and the Jayhawks are just two parts of a growing league in Utah, one that affords opportunities to either start, restart or preserve football programs.
“The league is further ahead in stability than we thought we would be in Year 2, and we want to continue to increase that stability and growth,” Monticello coach Reed Anderson said. “I’m confident that other schools see this as an opportunity to enter a league that can help with cost, experience, development, safety, and other factors.”
Sources close to the Deseret News have verified interest in eight-player football at at least 11 other schools, most of them being standard 1A schools. In the current classification, all but two of the eight schools are 1A in other sports. St. Joseph plays in 2A in other sports, as does Water Canyon, which was just moved up in realignment this year.
That’s one of the most prominent differences between eight-player football teams and the regular 1A league. With the exception of Milford, all 1A teams playing 11-player football are schools in the 2A classification in every other sport.
Reportedly, the Milford football program is similarly on its way to becoming an eight-player team as well due to declining enrollment, but the community pushed hard to preserve its 1A status for at least another year.
“I think I can speak for most teams in that the goal is building a competitive, lasting program,” Rich coach Tyson Larsen said. “Due to numbers, some may not be able to field or compete with an 11-man team, but I think the best outcome of eight-player (football) is to get programs headed in the right direction.
“The most frequently discussed topic is the number of teams competing. I would hope that we can get enough small schools competing in eight-player that several could also jump back in the 1A league at some point, but the issue right now is there are so few small schools playing football, which makes the 1A league actually a ‘2A league.’
“I hope we can get our programs to be able to consistently compete with those larger schools, but the more smaller schools that join, the more feasible that opportunity and goal becomes.”