‘These are my brothers’: South’s football season ends with a big win — and questions

Editor’s note: This is the fourth and final installment in a series of stories about the efforts to rebuild a football culture at South Eugene High School. You can read the first part of the series here, the second part here and the third part here.

Two hours into a Monday evening film session on Oct. 19, Eric Scott was folded into a desk at the front of South Eugene High School’s team room. The head football coach had spent the first 40 minutes with the screen behind him frozen on the opening kickoff of the previous Thursday’s game, soliciting answers — solutions, he hoped — from his team.

“Speak up,” he said to the two dozen players in shoved-together seats. “Just tell me what you’re thinking.”

His team had won three games, and none of them had been against varsity opponents. Handed a chance to change that, on the road three days earlier against Horizon Christian, problems piled up instead of points.

The Axe forced a fumble on the opening kickoff, but didn’t recover and were trampled underneath a 55-yard, one-play touchdown on the next snap. They fumbled on their first play from scrimmage, then gave up another long rushing touchdown immediately afterward.

A snap went over junior quarterback Colby Yeager’s head, and instead of recovering the ball, multiple players blocked for each other while a Horizon Christian defender scooped and scored. South Eugene lost, 42-14, but there were too many issues to make it past the first half of the game tape.

Scott searched for a metaphor to describe his frustration.

“If there’s a candy bar sitting over there — your favorite candy bar,” he said, “You’d find a way to get over there and get it. This is no different.”

The team was midway through the first half of film when the clock on the wall ticked past 6 p.m., and Scott decided enough was enough. Running back Daniel Jetty asked if they could watch one of South Eugene’s touchdowns, hoping they could end on a high note, he said later.

Scott slammed his hand on the desk, rattling the room.

“We lost the freaking game!” the coach replied.

“Does that not matter?” Scott said. “What’s more important? One-play touchdowns and a loss, or touchdowns and winning the game? Watch it on your own time, and when we do good s—, we can sit here and celebrate.”

The room stayed quiet.

“It has to change,” Scott said. “Because we’re too close to keeping this thing going in the right direction to mess it up. Do you understand?”

‘Find a way’ 

In the back of that film room, two printed pictures of a day three years ago hang askew, paired in a frame.

There hasn’t been another Bryce Boettcher — not another three-sport star with the NFL and MLB in his future — in South Eugene’s football program since he graduated in 2020. At South Eugene, Boettcher started at quarterback on the football team as a sophomore. He spent his winters on the basketball court. He went to University of Oregon for baseball, then walked onto the football team and was eventually drafted in both sports.

In the middle of all that, he came back to his high school. When then-head coach Edmund Rivera put in a call in 2023, the Axe were coming off a loss.

Boettcher came through South Eugene’s sports programs with a class of brothers, he remembers. The now-NFL linebacker doesn’t remember games so much as memories with that group.

“I think I just talked about the will to win,” Boettcher said. “And how our motto there was ‘Find a way.’”

It’s funny, Boettcher thought, because as he remembers that, he’s recovering from practice at an NFL facility in Indianapolis. The motto on the road to redemption for his Colts team?

“Find a way.”

“You’ll always be overlooked playing at South Eugene,” Boettcher remembered saying at the front of that room. “But you can use that as something to your advantage. I was overlooked my whole life, and I think it primarily came from my days at South, but you can use it as fuel and become really good if you use it in the right way.”

‘Greatest three years of my life’

It rained Oct. 26, the Monday of the final week of practice. The final game, against Lebanon, was scheduled for that Thursday. South’s players — its 19 healthy ones — sat in the end zone of the turf field at the start of the day. Some crossed their legs. Some stretched out. Some closed their eyes. In front of them, offensive coordinator Jay Mitchell was trying something new.

“Don’t think about school,” Mitchell, shielded from the rain by a hood and the brim of a hat, said. “Don’t think about homework. Don’t think about your girl.”

He calls this exercise “nervous system regulation,” and he picked it up from athlete training and wellness coaching he does outside his work at South Eugene. It started in the days after the Horizon Christian film session, when players told the staff they had trouble focusing on the game. When Mitchell was late one day later that week and the team didn’t do the practice, they came to him and asked to find some time.

“Breathe,” Mitchell says. “Notice your surroundings. Be present. Be here.”

The 16-year-old Jetty wasn’t sure if he’ll be back “here” next year.

He said a scheduling mix-up when he transferred to South Eugene two years ago led to him being placed in 10th grade instead of ninth. He could be a junior right now, with another year of high school in front of him. He’s trying to see if there’s a way to reclassify and hired a lawyer to try to navigate it. The question is still under review.

So, for now, he’s a senior, and at the end of the last day of practice, Wednesday of Lebanon week, he took his final lap and ducked underneath the tunnel of juniors and underclassmen and coaches paying tribute. Later that night, at team dinner, he stood at the front, in line with the graduating class. When it was his turn to give a speech, he obliged with a grin, but was still unsure if he’d do it again next year.

“These last three years I’ve played with you all, they’ve been the greatest three years of my life,” he told the team. “I wouldn’t want to do it with anyone else, and tomorrow, we’re going to beat the brakes off Lebanon. We’ll end the season as a winning team, and then you all will carry it on next year.”

His backplate pad had a theme now: a quote from Avengers villain Thanos. It was carefully inscribed in all-caps Sharpie over the tape which covers the pad.

“Dread it, run from it, destiny arrives all the same,” it read.

South Eugene hasn’t finished a year over .500 since 2019 — since Boettcher left. As the team prepared for its final game of the season, its record was 3-3.

An uncertain future

In a preseason interview, Scott said that he wanted to build the program to a championship standard.

Now, South Eugene’s coaches and officials, though aiming for a varsity program in 2027, are unsure what next season holds. The school must make a decision on whether it’ll go fully independent in the sport or return to a 5A or 6A schedule. Most of those decisions, which Scott said will start to happen in June 2027, will be decided by the numbers the program draws in camp.

On senior night, the line of the players the program will lose stretched from the 20-yard line back toward the locker room as they waited to walk in a pregame ceremony. In the middle, Dash Fortner looked down at his arm.

There was his pseudo-tattoo, a phrase, written in marker, that his dad tells him before every game. He’d get nervous, back in sophomore year. He watched the television show “Ted Lasso” with his dad. Now, on the inside of his arm between a double-wrapped white sweat band and his purple-and-white glove reads “MUCHO JOY!”

Fortner hadn’t played much this year. A head injury meant he was relegated to the sidelines, waiting to pass one test, then another. Thursday against Lebanon would be his third game, after the opener and Horizon Christian.

It was, in his words, a “strange” year.

Jetty opened South Eugene’s scoring with a first-quarter 61-yard burst. When he arrived at South, Fortner was the lead back, Jetty remembers. He called him “Mentor Dash.”

“He taught me everything I know,” Jetty said.

Fortner ran with mucho joy Thursday night, as he skirted around edges and cruised through gaps. Fortner piled atop a score by Jetty with a 30-yard weave into the end zone. Both scored again before Fortner took a Wildcat snap and broke free from 67 yards out in the third quarter to cap South Eugene’s scoring.

With the game all but decided, a late knock sent Fortner back to the bench. He kicked his foot in the turf as he walked off, grimaced, took stock, then rose and grinned from the sideline as the Axe’s 39-6 lead held and their 4-3 winning season materialized.

Afterward, with the team in front of him and soaked from a Gatorade shower, Scott encouraged them to spend as much time as they could on the field before they left that night.

“It was just bittersweet, because I didn’t want it to end,” Scott said. “I wanted the game to continue on and on and on. If I had to miss work tomorrow because we were still playing, I wouldn’t mind that.”

The path Boettcher took to football, through local programs with his friends, is muddied today. There isn’t a robust local feeder program, and players instead must go to different neighborhoods — near other schools with more established programs — in order to play before high school.

“I think the special thing about Bryce and his class,” former South Eugene and current Pleasant Hill head coach Kenny Koberstein said, “was that they decided to stick together and stick at South. That was really important to them. I know we had coaches inside of 4J who were calling Bryce to go other places, and he never really had any interest in that.”

Whether they’ll play depends on whether parents will let them. Fortner wore a Guardian Cap — a helmet cover designed to help prevent brain injury — against Lebanon, the day after news broke of a Boston University research study that found at least 75% of NFL players who died during the 15-year research period had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, known as CTE. Other South Eugene players have worn the Guardian Caps throughout the season, too.

South’s coaches preached safe tackling technique, and they spent significant time during practice teaching players how to place their head on the correct side of the player they’re tackling.

But it might not be enough to assuage the concerns about brain health, and even if a local youth program emerges, “I don’t know if (the numbers are) possible, given the demographic,” Boettcher said.

South Eugene thrives in other sports. In the second half against Lebanon, the public-address announcer read out podium-sweeping results from the district cross-country meet. The boys and girls soccer teams which Axe football splits the field with are both headed to state playoffs. All three sports share a season with football.

“Are there enough parents that will let their kids nowadays play tackle football in that area?” Boettcher asked. “When I was a kid, it was fine. I don’t think I’m that old (Boettcher is 24), but it was a little different. I feel like nowadays it’s probably even worse.”

If Jetty’s reclassification is granted, he’ll have to decide whether he’ll stay at South Eugene. He’s had an offer from Lewis and Clark College since last year, but if the Axe’s numbers aren’t up and he gets another year, he said he’d consider other high school options. He’s not sure yet where he’ll be.

Yeager, who also plays safety and who sealed the senior night win with two interceptions, has no qualms about what’s next.

“As a kid, you’re always thinking of what it would be like to be QB1,” he said. “It’s just so surreal. It kind of feels like imposter syndrome, a little bit. I feel like I’m living someone else’s life.”

He’s not. He’s the center of next year’s team, the lineman who became a quarterback for a program which needed one, and he wants more.

“I think I’ve created such a bond to this team,” he said. “Even if it’s another season just like this one, no matter what, I’ll come back.

“These are my brothers. I love being in purple. These are my guys I’ve grown up with.”