Hardee HS

[E.T.]

Broken Memories

By JOEY JOHNSTON jjohnston@tampatrib.com

Published: Sep 1, 2004

 

WAUCHULA - Football players at Hardee High School draw strength from their secret weapon. It is big and burly. Made from several tons of concrete, its seats always are filled to capacity.

It is a traditional backdrop for fall Friday nights, when orange-and-blue-clad fans converge from every corner of this county, from places such as Zolfo Springs, Bowling Green, Ona and Wauchula.

It is home.

Wildcat Stadium.

``Now when I look at it,'' Hardee senior quarterback Travis Tubbs said, ``I just think about all the memories. It doesn't seem possible. Some of us may never get to play there again.''

Wildcat Stadium, a slice of small-town Americana, where up to 10,000 of the county's residents congregate to watch their teenage heroes, has been condemned by engineers.

Nineteen days ago, it met an unscheduled opponent - Hurricane Charley - that rammed through Florida's heartland. Some people thought the sturdy edifice was the safest place in Hardee County. They were wrong.

Charley's winds, estimated at nearly 140 mph, crumpled three 100-foot-high light towers. Like an erector set gone mad, one was broken over the press box and hurled into the reserved seating section, where it blasted significant holes through the concrete. Engineers later determined that a portion of the stadium was pulled from its foundation and shifted some 18 inches.

Repeat: The immovable structure had been moved.

``If that doesn't teach you about the power of a hurricane, nothing will,'' Hardee coach Derren Bryan said.

Now 35-year-old Wildcat Stadium is abandoned. ``Do Not Enter ... Unsafe!'' reads a handmade plywood sign near the ticket window. Barring a change, the Hardee Wildcats won't enjoy their familiar home-field advantage this season. Every game will be played away, or at a neutral site.

A similar challenge faces Charlotte High, in Punta Gorda, the coastal town most commonly associated with the hurricane's wrath. The Charlotte Tarpons are without a home, too.

At Hardee, some 55 miles inland, the well-manicured game field is fine for practice. So the team gets daily reminders. The Wildcats work in the shadow of their broken stadium, near a staging area for disaster relief workers, down the street from the distribution of free meals and supplies.

Are there larger priorities? Of course. Some Hardee residents still don't have power. When school reopened Monday, the campus water supply was deemed unsafe. Some students are low on nourishment. Others need clothing or shoes.

Several local businesses, including the shell of a Subway restaurant that resembles a bomb target, are literally picking up the pieces along U.S. 17.

More than two weeks after the hurricane, a few Hardee players are just now surfacing. Some had fled out of town with their families. Others had to work.

``Practice seems kind of secondary when you've got to pull trees out from your living room,'' Bryan said. ``We haven't worked on much football. We mostly worked on togetherness. We're just now getting back to normal.''

The football team plays on. But instead of the scheduled home opener Friday night, the Wildcats, an elite Class 2A program that has won 22 consecutive regular-season games, are forced to travel to Fort Meade, the first stop on a season-long road trip.

``You don't want your homecoming game to be at somebody else's stadium,'' Wildcats senior center Aaron Himrod said. ``You don't want senior night somewhere else.

``I know there are more important things than football right now. People have lost their homes and businesses. But they also look forward to being in that stadium on Friday nights for Wildcat football. I think the games can help us heal. If only there was a way to play just one more game in Wildcat Stadium. I'd give anything for that.''

Time Of Their Lives

Why does it mean so much? To understand that, you must understand Hardee County, the kind of place where there are no strangers.

Bryan, a Wildcat lineman in the late 1980s, said both of his great-grandfathers lived in Wauchula. He attended college in Colorado and coached at another high school. But his heart's desire was no secret.

``To come home,'' Bryan said. ``Being the coach here is a dream come true. I feel like the luckiest guy in the world.''

Bryan's earliest memories are of Wildcat Stadium, the sights and sounds of Friday night and the players who seemed like larger-than-life figures. He still gets chills when the band strikes up and players burst through a sign underneath the goalposts.

Very seriously, the young Bryan once asked his father if the Hardee Wildcats could beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The father just laughed and shook his head.

``But in my mind, I was thinking, `Yes they can!' '' Bryan said. ``Around here, the Hardee Wildcats are the biggest thing going.''

Wildcats players sometimes visit elementary schools and read to children. Coaches give them an offseason ``character curriculum,'' in which they learn attitude and leadership skills.

``People know who the football players are,'' senior receiver Rashad Vance said. ``They look up to us. We feel [a responsibility] to act a certain way. We feel the tradition of this program.''

Himrod, a 5-foot-9, 180- pound three-year starter, is a third-generation Wildcats football player. He carries a 4.6 grade-point average and projects as the school's valedictorian. He is undecided about a college choice, but already knows he won't be playing football.

``This is it for me,'' Himrod said. ``One more season. A lot of us are like that. We're not overly blessed with Division I- type talent. We're a smaller, scrappier type team. When this season is over, a lot of us will have played our last football game. This is the time of our lives. We want it to last because it's very special.''

Even away from home, it will remain special. Hardee fans travel in packs, sometimes outnumbering the home crowd.

``This experience has been real sobering for us all,'' said cattleman Doyle Carlton III, a lifetime Wauchula resident and member of one of Florida's pioneer families. ``I think a football game is coming at the right time. The community can use something else to think about.''

Charley's Arrival

On the fifth day of their senior year - Friday the 13th - the Hardee Wildcats had a day off from practice. School was closed. They were at home with family, waiting out a storm.

``It was going to Tampa,'' Vance said. ``I thought we were just going to get some rain and wind.''

Then Charley made a right turn.

``It started coming,'' Tubbs said. ``It got loud. We all got in the hallway and put a big mattress over the top of us. It was scary.''

Tubbs saw century-old oak trees being uprooted. Vance saw his portable basketball goal flying down the neighborhood, smashing into a mailbox.

``The sound just howls, like a train,'' Vance said. ``You think you're ready, but you get all nervous. My sister was crying. My mother was crying. I didn't know what was going to happen.''

The power went off. Shingles peeled away from roofs. Himrod's father, a citrus nurseryman, lost half of his grove crop. A tool shed, built to withstand winds of 100 mph, was shredded into pieces and scattered across the nursery.

``The force of that wind was ungodly,'' Himrod said. ``I was awed by it.''

No one knew about damage at the stadium. No one except junior-varsity coach Rod Smith. Living in a mobile home, Smith and his wife retreated to an obvious safe haven - Wildcat Stadium.

``It would take a heck of a gust for anything to happen there,'' Smith said.

It happened. Smith and his wife were in the football field house, until the wood roof caved in, filling the room with water. They scampered into a locker room underneath the stadium, unaware that lights were about to crash into the concrete seating, putting them dangerously close to a potentially disastrous situation.

``We were scared a lot more afterward,'' Smith said. ``Who could've pictured our stadium getting hit like that? Who could've pictured it actually being moved? What an incredible force of nature.''

Bryan said his players have rebounded from their initial ``state of depression'' upon learning about the stadium damage. Hardee principal Mike Wilkinson said more engineers will inspect the stands next week, exploring repairs or contingency plans.

Several schools on Hardee's schedule will split the gate receipts. Arcadia DeSoto, which has played a rivalry game against Hardee each season since 1908, has offered use of its stadium on Friday nights without a conflict.

``Putting myself in the position of a graduating senior, a football player, a band person, I'd want to perform at my house,'' Wilkinson said. ``We'll do whatever we can, within the boundaries of safety. Can it be fixed? Do we tear it down and start over? That's what we need to find out.''

In the meantime, the games go on. Bryan, using football coachspeak, said it's a normal week. The Wildcats have a winning streak to protect, a target on their back and a community that needs good things to happen.

``Wherever we have to play, we will get out there and play hard, like the Wildcats always do,'' Vance said.

``Wildcat football tradition is not a building,'' Bryan said. ``It's deep in this community. It's in all of our hearts.''

Nothing can take that away.

Not even a hurricane.