Players Come Away Looking for More after an Up-and-Down Season
Matthew Minsk
Down twenty points in the first half of the inaugural game of the league generally doesn’t foreshadow success. Add in that the opposing team would end the season in last place, and the picture doesn’t look any rosier. Certainly one wouldn’t expect that team to lose in a close championship game — a game marred by the team’s worst game in at least six weeks and officiating errors, literally a game of inches on numerous occasions. But that is exactly what happened to AJA’s first-ever flag football team.
According to AJA Athletic Director Rodney Zimmerman, his Weber School counterpart Scott Seagraves presented the idea of a flag football league to their colleagues at a summer planning meeting. Based on the “passion for football” he saw from students playing during lunch times, Coach Zimmerman opted to join the league.
Coach Zimmerman’s assessment of students’ feelings towards football seem to be well founded. Receiver Noah Chen noted, “I always have loved playing football,” a sentiment fellow receiver/backup quarterback Elliot Sokol and linebacker Antheny Ishkakov repeated nearly verbatim.
The league consists of AJA, Weber, Atlanta Classical Academy, and Fulton Leadership Academy. In six regular season games, each team played each other team twice. All games were played on Thursday afternoons at Weber.
As the season progressed, AJA’s team improved; after recording a 1-2 record in the first half of the season, the Jaguars outscored their opponents 87-20 en route to three consecutive wins.
After falling behind 20-0 in their first game, AJA stormed back to only lose by 8 points against Fulton Leadership Academy. The next week, the Jaguars defeated Atlanta Classical Academy 27-20 after completing a game-winning “Hail Mary” in the final seconds. To close out the first half, they fell to Weber 29-28 in overtime, after failing to convert the point-after attempt following a touchdown.
Throughout the opening stretch, the team improved steadily, clearly gaining comfort with both league rules that were somewhat fluid and the sport of flag football as a whole. For example, after throwing three interceptions in the first game, quarterback Doni Chasen didn’t throw another for the rest of the regular season.
Gameplay also changed dramatically after the first game due to rules technicalities. In the first game of the season, centers were restricted to pass protection and blitzing as a concept hadn’t been introduced. Those two key facets of the game first appeared in the second game and remained for the rest of the season.
On the defensive side, Coach Brett “Broggy” Rogers diagnosed that “big plays… killed us the first half of the season.” In practices, the team worked repeatedly on deterring single plays that could take the opposition down the field.
After the first Weber game, the consensus among AJA players was that their team was the best in the league, but they had been held back by poor execution. They also opined that the league suffered greatly for officiating errors and confusion. Coming off a stinging loss, players aimed frustration at Weber, noticing that the commissioner and organizer of the league was coaching against them on the opposing sideline.
When asked about his observations about the league, unprompted by any mention of refereeing, Noah simply offered, “The refs don’t know how to officiate.”
Doni presented a concurring view, remarking that the referees were “inconsistent” and “don’t know the rules.” He provided an example: “One time, [Weber] had 5 downs.”
Antheny also mentioned that his trust in the league and its officiating was shaken “when [AJA] went to overtime with the person that wrote ‘no overtime’ in the rule book.” (The rulebook states that any game tied at the end of regulation in the regular season is recorded as a tie, meaning overtime should not have been played in the regular season loss to Weber that Antheny referred to.)
Despite their pessimism towards the league and even after a somewhat disappointing beginning of the season, AJA players didn’t lack confidence. Noah identified his team as “da best,” while Elliot was not shy about proclaiming, “We can win this thing if we execute well.”
Antheny also noted that “the team has a lot of potential to be great.”
While players can get caught up in their own self-confidence, coaches often are able to better assess their team accurately. In this case, Coach Broggy agreed with the players’ opinions. He praised the team “for their work ethic and desire to improve every route they run and every play we perform.” Looking back at the first half of the season, Coach Broggy assessed, “We’re becoming a strong team and a definite contender for the trophy this season.”
As the second half of the season scores can attest to, AJA’s confidence was correctly placed. Playing against the same teams in the same order, AJA ripped off 28-6 and 25-6 victories. The highly-anticipated rematch against the home school turned into a 24-8 blow out in favor of the Jaguars.
Coach Broggy highlighted the team’s emphasis on wiping out the long plays as crucial to their standout defense over the three game stretch. He also credited the offense with “[keeping] mistakes and turnovers to the absolute minimum, forcing other teams to score every time they had the ball.”
Commenting on the offense’s success, Noah nicknamed his quarterback “Doni Dimes,” a play on New York Giants quarterback Daniel “Danny Dimes” Jones. He also noted, “We really gelled as a team the last three weeks.”
The gunslinger himself asserted, “We’re firing on all cylinders.”
Describing the same concept, Elliot said, “We’re finally using our chemistry in the right way to be able to dominate teams.”
In addition, to add icing on the cake, officiating seemed to have improved. While officiating errors are less apparent in more one-sided games, Coach Broggy still described a “smoothness” and “clarity” present in the second half that was missing previously.
In the first round of the playoffs AJA handily took care of Fulton Leadership Academy, winning 28-12. Despite the comfortable margin of victory, Coach Broggy commented on the sideline as the clock wound down that the game was much more stressful for him than the score would indicate.
The stress could have been the result of the slow start AJA had to overcome. After surrendering a touchdown on the first possession of the game, Doni threw his first interception since Week 1 on the ensuing drive. With prime field position, it appeared FLA was about to take a commanding 12-0 lead. However, after two stops on the goaline, cornerback Simmy Wilson tipped the ball up and Doni, playing safety, came down will the ball in the end zone. AJA wouldn’t look back, scoring 28 unanswered points.
The next week, in the championship game, many of the issues that had plagued AJA throughout the year returned with a vengeance. After allowing an opening touchdown to Weber, AJA turned the ball over on downs around midfield when a bobbling catch by Noah on fourth down was ruled out of bounds.
AJA was able to secure a defensive stop and scored to take a 7-6 lead with just two minutes left before halftime, but a long play with under thirty seconds remaining in the half gave Weber the ball at around the five-yard line with time left for one play. Refereeing controversy struck again: On the final play of the half, the Weber player’s flag appeared to be down at the one-yard line, but the official ruled that the ball crossed into the endzone, propelling Weber to a 12-7 lead at the half.
High School Judaic Studies principal Rabbi Allan Houben, a spectator at the game, remarked afterwards that the touchdown scored before the half and conversion attempt that followed looked identical, yet the conversion try was marked short, only furthering the controversy.
In the second half of the game, each team scored once, leaving the score at 18-14 with just thirty seconds to play after AJA forced a turnover on downs inside their own ten-yard line. Despite being plagued by inaccurate quarterbacking in his worst game of the season, Doni appeared to complete a throw to Elliot around midfield — only for the play to be ruled incomplete when the referee saw the ball on the ground seconds after the play. Another long incompletion and a doomed hook-and-lateral play, and Weber emerged as the champion on their own field.
Team Captain Eitan refused to pin the loss on the referees, despite subpar officiating. (A Weber player acknowledged after the game that poor officiating played a large role in the game, even admitting that his team benefitted.) He repeatedly told the team that “while there were certainly questionable calls and a couple definitely wrong calls, the loss was not on the refs. The loss was on us.”
Despite visible anger and disappointment at the loss, the postgame huddle possessed an upbeat attitude. The tough ending aside, players and Coach Broggy were proud of how far the team had come, and how hard they had worked.
Team “hype man” and center Yered Wittenberg added some perspective, noting that “Weber had double our team sitting on their bench,” an allusion to Weber’s nearly thirty man team compared to AJA’s eleven-person squad.
In the team group chat after the game, Yered summarized the team’s feelings aptly: “This was something special and we won together and now we gotta (sic) lose together.”
In response, he received messages of determination that the team will come back stronger next season with one focus: Raising the championship trophy.
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