Tuesday, 3 p.m. Coach Brown doesn't raise his voice to deliver his message in a speech before practice on the field: LCC needs a victory over Escondido to have a shot at a bye and home-field advantage in the playoffs. He doesn't know whether the players did the math or picked up on the message. That has been an issue all season -- how to reach them. Coach Brown doesn't have a player who can give him a read of the room. It's not Connor. He's the dog whose tail always wags. His mood isn't the team's mood. His way of doing things isn't always what they draw up on the blackboard, but he gets the job done. His coach says Connor often chooses his own road "but he seems to land in the right place."
It's a bad practice. Missed assignments. No energy. Wideout Kenny Stills, son of former Green Bay Packers defensive back Ken Stills, has a sore hip, but his teammates suspect he's babying it. He sits on a bench on the sideline, talking with injured kids in their street clothes about "Madden NFL '08." "I beat that guy so easy I was text messaging at the same time," he says.
In Stills' mind, he's the biggest talent on the team. Others think it's Ian Seau, unmistakably Junior's nephew, easy to pick out of any crowd, easier at LCC. Ian is a man at 15, at least physically, a 6-foot-4, 235-pound sophomore, last week's defensive player of the game. The Mavericks still talk about his scooping up a fumble and taking it to the house, pulling away from a wide receiver. Ian lives in Oceanside but commutes to La Costa Canyon. His teammates figure the Seau name would have put a lot of pressure on him at O-side. He told them his parents didn't want to have him hanging around with family at Oceanside. He doesn't mention the gangs in O-side, but the Mavericks know all about it from the papers. They might even know that one of Junior Seau's brothers went to jail for an assault with a baseball bat. Ian doesn't talk about O-side He wears his hair short, like his uncle Junior's.
3:30 p.m. With the starters on defense against the scout offense, Ian turns right when he should have turned left, and Jacob Driver, a linebacker and the defensive captain, gets in his grille. "How many times are we going to have to run it?" he says, his words liberally salted with disgust and profanity. Ian whips off his helmet, and the coaches have to separate them.
"That's it," Ian says. "I quit." And with that, he stalks off the field and up the hill to the dressing room. Nobody seems surprised. Nobody tries to stop him. The players' reaction:
Big deal, happens every couple of weeks.
Finally, an assistant coach runs up to Jacob. "His captain wasn't there for him," he says forcefully. Be a leader. "Do you understand?"
Jacob, the absent captain in question, seems shocked, as if he had never before heard a coach raise his voice. He jogs to the dressing room. Backups fill in for the two starters. Practice carries on indifferently. None of this fazes Connor in the least. He doesn't come off the field. Defensive first string, special teams. On his way to the house, he dodges phantom tacklers and in the end zone he bounces, raises his arms and does a 360.