Learning how to win — and less-joyous lessons — for Axe football 

Editor’s note: This is the second story in a continuing series about the effort to revive the football program at South Eugene High School. Read the first part of the series here.

Ja Barkley-Jones dresses in joy.

The California kid turned South Eugene high schooler takes the field in yellow “Spongebob Squarepants” receiver gloves. 

He wanted something purple, too, to represent the Axe’s primary color. His smile greets teammates as they file past the bench on the side of the South Eugene field. As they pass, the violet face of the McDonald’s character Grimace graces the pad that protects his lower back.

There has been plenty of room for joy in South Eugene football’s locker room as it labors to discover what it means to build a high school football culture in a place where it has struggled.

And yet joy alone is not always what builds culture.

There needs to be room for memory and sweat and perspective. And history, too. Because history is important, and three years is a long time — certainly in the life of a high school senior.

Three years without a win, then, is an eon. Second-year head coach Eric Scott hadn’t yet overseen one at South when his team boarded its bus to travel an hour north to Lebanon Sept. 14 for a game against the Warriors’ junior varsity squad. Several of his student-athletes weren’t playing football the last time the Axe left a field with a victory. So knowing how to win — not just in the moments after that game, but in the next week, and when they stepped onto the next field as winners — was a skill that didn’t yet exist for South Eugene. That had to be taught, too.

“We need to get more leadership in the locker room,” Barkley-Jones said after practice Sept. 16. “[There needs to be] people stepping up, because they think it’s corny but at a point in time, there has to be some leadership here to get everybody on track.”

Barkley-Jones’ history with football begins in a living room in Redding, Calif., where he watched the New England Patriots romp to Super Bowl after Super Bowl. He played Pop Warner there, but his family’s move to Eugene fueled more desire to play the sport. 

Opportunities for youth football are limited around South Eugene, and so Barkley-Jones played in the Willamette League before eventually attending Willamette High School for his freshman and sophomore years.

He transferred to South Eugene and joined the football program as a junior, hoping for more snaps. That Monday in Lebanon, with quarterback Michael Shields unavailable, it looked as if that might become the case: He would play dual backup roles, to senior running back Daniel Jetty and to starting quarterback Colby Yeager. 

“He definitely has some minor development things to clean up, and he still does, but I just saw the natural athleticism,” offensive coordinator Jay Mitchell said of Barkley-Jones. “He’s lengthy. He’s not the biggest guy, not very tall either, but he’s tough and he’ll get in there. He’ll get his hands dirty. He has good instincts with the ball. It’s good to have a guy like that.”

A late score, a goal-line stand

As the game against the Warriors began without a kickoff — junior-varsity rules agreed upon between the two staffs — a man wrapped in a shin-length black puffer coat watched from the sideline. He occasionally checked his phone, tapping out a short message, then sending it.

South Eugene Athletic Director Jim Moore had decided to make the drive to Lebanon.  He’d also decided to become Scott’s live-updater.

Scott, meanwhile, sat at home. After he was ejected from the Axe’s season opener for drawing two personal fouls, he had to serve a mandatory one-game suspension. So the coach waited, reading texts from Moore updating him on the score, then more detailed ones on their field position.

A long Jetty touchdown put the Axe ahead when the senior got the edge and did what he had to wait until the final snap of their opener to do: hit the gas.

Lebanon’s quarterback responded, scrambling for an 18-yard score, then converted the two-point try to put the Warriors ahead, 8-6.

But Jetty got the edge again, this time on the next play from scrimmage, and romped 85 yards to the end zone. Yeager was stifled on a fourth-and-goal play where he rolled from the pocket and was buried by Warriors, but the Axe defense bowed up, then trekked the gravel path back to the locker room with a 12-8 lead.

All the things that South Eugene football hasn’t had to do in the last three years, like talk about how to play with a lead, or how to complete a win, became hastily hollered lessons in the gravel parking lots outside the halftime locker room and on the sideline.

In addition to the practical advice, the halftime gathering had touches of metaphor as well: Before the game, acting head coach Raul Gil-Azamar asked the coaching staff to dress in all black, so that he could tell his players that they were wearing it to the funeral of the losing streak. Yeager parlayed that at halftime into a fervorous modification. 

“It’s their funeral, not ours,” Yeager said as the Axe waited in that gravel parking lot to defend their lead.

In the second half, it just came down to joy. Yeager nabbed an interception and set the Axe up in the red zone, but the team couldn’t score and Lebanon went ahead on a 12-yard passing touchdown.

In the fourth quarter, South drove to the Lebanon 28-yard line. There, with three minutes left, the Axe put Yeager in the pistol with Jetty, who had racked up 200 rushing yards in the game, stacked behind him. 

But Jetty never got the ball.

Instead, Barkley-Jones, a late substitution, came from right to left on a reverse fly sweep and flashed through the exchange. Lebanon hands scraped off his white No. 2 jersey. Jetty and Yeager and Mitchell watched as he danced left, then right beyond fingertips and into pay dirt.

“He’s just so elusive,” Jetty said of his backfield partner. “It’s like you don’t even need blocks. I’ll be watching him run, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is about to be ‘tu-tu-tu-tu,’” he added, miming a miniature Barkley-Jones cutting left and right with his fingers.

“Because, for me, I’ll be fighting tooth and nail for every inch, and then he’ll just make it look easy. It’s like he’s skating around the field.”

Barkley-Jones, his work not done, swung left and secured Yeager’s two-point pass to put the Axe ahead, 20-14, with time dripping away.

But Lebanon drove 64 yards to South Eugene’s 11-yard line. Three plays — a quarterback scramble outside, then an incomplete pass, then a stuffed run with no timeouts left — left the Warriors on fourth down with the clock ticking inside of 30 seconds.

Yeager was South’s deep man in its hastily arranged defense as the Warriors rushed to snap the ball. All he remembered thinking was, “Please, please, please.”

Then he saw the Warriors’ last-gasp pass. 

“I started jumping up and down for joy,” he said.

The fourth-down pass slipped through the hands of Lebanon’s receiver, and the Axe took over on downs. But time remained on the clock. Normally, this is a situation when the quarterback takes a knee and the clock hits zero.

But Axe offensive coordinator Mitchell didn’t have a kneel-down play on his sheet. In three weeks, South Eugene never had practiced kneeling the ball.

They figured it out. Mitchell sent his team out in a heavy formation and told Yeager to take a knee. He did — along with four of his offensive linemen and Jetty in the backfield.
Gil-Azamar took a Gatorade bath. Jetty was wild-eyed. His pads were rolled up as he rolled around the away locker room, looking for another teammate to scream with. 

“It feels amazing. It’s the best feeling I’ve ever had in my life,” Jetty said. “Hey, three years? This was worth it. This win, right here, with this group of guys. Oh, my God. I’m just so excited.”

“I think everything changes,” Yeager said. “Even last year, when we got close to winning, five, 10 people joined. With a real win, I think more and more people will join.”

“We know we can do it once,” Jetty said. “We gotta work our asses off in practice, man. We’ve just got to repeat, repeat…fundamentals, man. It’s all we can do right now.”

When Moore’s final text — goal line stand, we won — pinged, Scott replied with a GIF of a baby in a Pittsburgh Penguins jersey, fists clenched, crowned by the text, “LET’S GOOOOOOO.” He selected one for the coaches’ group chat, too: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson doing the same. Then, he headed to the school to help unload the bus.

‘A long bus ride’

After South Eugene opened its season with a blowout loss to Phoenix, players thought a win would create momentum and charge their attempts at culture. Instead, they were still off the pace.

“It goes back to telling the players that you play how you practice,” Scott said before a practice the next week. “And our practices weren’t good last week, I’ll be honest.”

At their first full practice after the Lebanon win, a defensive day led by Gil-Almazar, players  started with a round of sprints after, Barkley-Jones said, they were “goofing off” during warm-ups. Push-ups punctuated poor effort. They ended with a tackling drill, then with a speech from Scott.

“This team has to be dedicated,” he said then. “Dedication leads to winning.”

A two-and-a-half hour bus ride south to Crater High School Sept. 21 didn’t help. When the team got off halfway through to stretch its legs, Scott watched as some of the student-athletes on their first road trip struggled to “lock in.”

South came out flat. Four first-half Crater touchdowns delivered the Axe into the break with a 28-0 deficit. Unlike their slow start in the opener, which left them down 43-0 at the half to Phoenix three weeks earlier, they didn’t leave the field. They stayed there, Jetty said, “Because I feel like if we would have gone to the locker room, everybody would have stayed the same.”

Jetty led that charge on the field.

“I feel like, this whole season, I’ve just been trying to do my thing, get as many yards as I can,” he said. “I’ll let [other] people figure out leadership. But then, I was like, ‘I’m a senior. I’ve got to step up. I’ve got to lead these boys.’”

The second half of the Crater game got better. South scored 12 unanswered points. Pegged back by a long Comets rushing score, the Axe put up 12 more, but a pick-six and a fumble recovered for a score buried their chances in what became a 44-28 loss.

“We had a long bus ride to soak in it,” Scott said. “We’ll soak it in when we watch film.”

Wednesday, Sept. 23 — after soaking it in on the bus, then in the film room — South returned to the field. 

“I chugged two Monsters [energy drinks],” Jetty said. “I got myself hype in the locker room. We changed up the warm-up a little bit.”

“There was a little speech in the huddle,” Yeager said.

If you go onto Jetty’s Instagram feed, it’s all motivational speeches — Brian Dawkins, Luke Kuechly, Tom Brady. Wednesday, he said, “I was just pulling those guys out.”

“Honestly, if you listen to the words, it might not make too much sense,” Yeager said. “But it gets you hyped up.”

“Especially when he’s screaming,” Barkley-Jones said.

Back when South was scheduled to play a 5A schedule, its next game would have been  against North Eugene’s varsity team. Instead, after a month of work, it will face the Highlanders’ junior-varsity squad Monday.

If football doesn’t work out, Barkley-Jones wants to be a history teacher. When he starts talking to someone about history, he says, he gets in a flow-state, one where it feels like he’s talking too much. It would be fun to teach, he thinks.

For the Axe, their win over Lebanon is history. So is the loss to Crater — it has to be, save for the lessons learned and the culture built. The Monday game against the Highlanders will add another chapter to that history — and, most likely, some new lessons. Maybe Barkley-Jones, a potential history teacher in the making, will be taking notes — and spreading joy.