Flag Football Follies: Comeback and Defensive Stand

Last week I introduced you to my son's flag football team and last night he had his only game of this week. In week #1 we probably played the best team in the league followed up by the worst team. I was curious to see how we would do against one of the middle class teams.

The other team had two good players but the rest of the team couldn't even line up right. The officials spent most of the first half warning the kids on their team and most of the second half calling penalties on them.

Their quarterback made a couple of nice running plays and they scored twice. On one of their touchdowns, four of our guys were in position to grab a flag and came up with air instead. Sometimes that happens.

Meanwhile, let's have a flashback to last week's game. Our second game, against the team that was not so good, I was able to make sure that every kid got a chance to make a play with the ball. After the game, I was telling my wife how happy I was because that wasn't going to happen every week.

My wife, the social worker and the nice half of our good-cop, bad-cop partnership, informed me how proud she was that I got all of the kids involved and that she expected that I would do that every game.

She reminded me that the league was about letting the kids have fun and not about winning. I hate it when she's right. But isn't winning fun? I always thought winning was fun. Maybe that's because I was the one running the ball to make that happen.

So, before the game I made up a list of everyone on the team and had one of my assistant coaches keep track to make sure that everyone got to make a play.

I had one of my younger kids that I planned to use for defense in the second half, so I made sure I got him a chance with the ball in the first half. We got the ball down around the five-yard line so I thought I would give him a chance then, thinking that he might even score a touchdown.

Instead, he decided to run backwards and we lost about 15 yards on the play and didn't score. Ouch.

At halftime we were tied 7-7 and I was able to see that two kids had yet to have a play run for them. One of them was my son.

They scored first in the second half and we came back and scored but missed the conversion run. It was the fourth quarter, they had the ball and time was running out. We came up with a big defensive stand and got the ball back with a little over three minutes to play.

One of our older kids made a great run with the ball and scored a touchdown. Everyone was lobbying for the ball on the conversion but it was time for me finally to get my boy, the last one to have a play with the ball, a carry.

Their best player lined up on our left every play. So we were running every play to the right. So I told them we were running a pitch to the right side. My son, the one I'm constantly praising for being so bright, lines up on the right side. But then he decides to run left.

Our quarterback made a great play to get him the ball and one of our linemen did a nice job to screen off their best guy. And the boy catches the pitch and runs into the end zone for the conversion.

It wasn't the way it was supposed to be, but man it was fantastic.

The only problem was we scored with too much time left on the clock. Their quarterback made a nice play and I thought he was going to break free for a touchdown but our last guy back got his flag. They got whistled for another penalty, we shut them down on the last play and walked away with our second win.

I was so proud of all of the kids on our team. Every one of them was out there competing to the best of their abilities. A game like this is great because we fell behind, didn't give up, came back to take the lead and finished off the game with a defensive stand. It doesn't get any better than that.

And the best part of all was that both of the boy's grandmothers were there to see it, including my mom getting to see him play football for the first time.