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The Crow Cougars have won three playoff games this season, all on the road. Saturday, the team will try to win its first state football championship.
It’s a rainy, chilly November evening at the Elmira High School football field.
Underneath the lights, 11 high school players and two coaches are going through yet another practice — improving pitchouts, working out the bugs in long snaps to a punter, fine-tuning the running game.
The players, clad in helmets and shoulder pads (and an array of clothing options below the waist, including what appear to be a pair of pajama bottoms), good-naturedly run through the drills. No one seems troubled by the rain. No one complains.
Well, almost no one.
“You look confused or constipated,” Nick Nevins, the head coach, tells a player after one play.
The player in question — who last weekend tossed a 47-yard touchdown pass to propel his team into the state championship game — doesn’t miss a beat: “I am confused and constipated,” he says.
Friday, the Crow Cougars — the last Lane County team remaining in Oregon’s prep football playoffs — will climb on a bus, get a big sendoff from the town and travel to Redmond High School, where they’ll play at 1 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 29, for the 1A six-player title.
Their opponent: undefeated Harper Charter from Malheur County, the No. 2 overall seed. On paper, the Cougars, the No. 9 seed in the tournament, would appear to be underdogs.
Just like they were in their other three playoff games.
The Cougars (9-2 overall) now have won three straight playoff games on the road: a 52-12 first-round win over Dayville-Monument-Long Creek, a quarterfinal victory over the No. 1 seed, in-county rival Triangle Lake, and the semifinal win, a 45-39 shootout against Elkton.
That semifinal win says something about the unpredictable, wide-open nature of six-player football. At halftime, Crow led, 6-0. In the second half, the teams combined for 78 points and the game was tied, 39-39, with 7 seconds left.
That’s when Cayden Hernandez — he’s listed on the team’s roster as a wide receiver and defensive end — threw the 47-yard pass to Levi Betts to win the game.
The Cougars usually are a run-first team, but Hernandez saw that the Elks were defending against a run.
“And that’s when I saw Levi coming out just wide-open,” Hernandez said. “I just bombed that sucker. I don’t even know how to explain it — it was just amazing.”
Wide-open football
Six-player football was developed in the Midwest in the 1930s as a way for smaller schools — like Crow, with about 70 students in the high school — to field teams.
The game is played on a narrower field than the 11-player variety — 40 yards as opposed to 53⅓. (For their practices this week, the Cougars were at the Elmira field, which has a turf field similar to that at Redmond High School.)
In six-player football, the player who receives the snap can’t advance the ball past the line of scrimmage without handing it off, pitching it or throwing it. Every player is an eligible receiver.
Nevins, the Crow coach, said the six-player game often is compared to “the basketball on turf kind of thing where everybody is eligible. So the center who snaps the ball can run a pass route and does. I mean, that’s pretty common.”
So offenses can strike quickly and often. Crow and Elkton racked up more than 800 yards combined in that semifinal game. That’s why teams have to move the ball 15 yards, instead of 10, to earn a first down.
Making history
Crow never has won a state football championship, although the Cougars played in a title game in 1993.
Nevins and his players know knocking off Harper Charter will be a challenge, and the game presents an interesting clash of styles: The Hornets are a pass-first team, as opposed to Crow’s tendency to run.
“Harper Charter is probably, I’d say, the best team in the state,” Nevins said, “just athletic from top to bottom on the roster. Very impressive. They flow very well. They just move. That’s the one thing that stands out.”
But Hernandez said it would be a mistake to discount the underdog Cougars: “I think if we play our best game, we definitely have what it takes to beat them. … We just want to make history.”
This Crow team already has made a bit of history — especially considering the team won just twice last year and once the year before. Foster Otley, a running back and linebacker, said this year’s team has been getting better as the season has gone along — and Otley, the team’s leading tackler, has been a big reason.
Nevins, who works at EWEB, is in his third year as head coach and worked as a volunteer assistant before that. He started coaching because his son was on the team. This year’s deep playoff run shows how far the Cougar program has come.
“When I was first an assistant, four years ago, we had eight kids on the team, and [in] our last game of the season, we started the game with six and ended the game with four. We were playing four versus six … because of injuries. It’s just one of those things that we’ve slowly built up, and it’s a culture.”
It’s a culture based on relationships, he said.
“I love football. I love watching football, but coaching never entered my mind until a few years ago. And the only reason — even after my son graduated — the only reason I’m sticking around is for this, for those kids, for the community, for the school. Yeah, that’s my driver right now.”
Lookout Eugene-Springfield photographer Isaac Wasserman contributed reporting for this story.
