SEVERANCE — Matthew Van Praag spoke from a broken heart, shards scraping his soul.
“No one in the country has been through what we’ve been through,” the coach told his Evergreen High School football team. “Everybody has your back. Everybody.”
His Cougars leaned closer. It was 15 minutes to 7 p.m. About a half-hour earlier, they warmed up at Severance High School’s football stadium under low clouds, shaking off three weeks of rust and two weeks of angst while mosquitoes nipped at their calves.
Van Praag was going over film with his quarterbacks inside Evergreen High on Sept. 10 when he heard shots down the hall. A gunman had opened fire inside the building, wounding two students before taking his own life.
Friday night was the Cougars’ first game back. Their coach took a deep breath. A smile came and went. Every few seconds, the call sheet attached to his waist would rattle as he turned, breaking the silence.
“The last two weeks,” Van Praag said, “have been unlike any team that’s been here before.”
He reminded them that they were together. That they were safe. That they were loved. He raised both arms out wide and pointed to the 28 faces staring back at him, battered but unbowed.
“I believe,” Van Praag said softly. The call sheet rattled again. “I believe in you.”
‘It felt like an eternity’
The voices we hear at our darkest moments, hands extended from hope, are the ones that stay with us forever.
Matt’s son Declan is a freshman wide receiver and defensive back on the Cougars roster. On Sept. 10, just as the school went into lockdown, the teen was supposed to be watching film next door. But dad had no idea if his son was in the room, or heaven forbid, somewhere else.
Van Praag texted assistant coach Chris Post.
Is Declan OK?
Post messaged back.
Yes, he’s OK. Everything’s all right,
“This coaching staff, they’re just amazing human beings,” Matt recalled later. “We have people from all walks of life. We don’t have any coaches in the building.
“And so for us to have been there and for my son to be with Coach Post, I felt that he was going to be OK. And that (Post) was going to do whatever he could to protect his kid, just like I was going to do whatever I could to protect the kids that were in my room.”
Declan told me he doesn’t remember much. He saw nothing. He heard plenty.
“We had to barricade the door,” Declan said, “and then got to the corner and just waited for the authorities to show up.”
“They said it was not too long of a time,” Declan said, “but it felt like an eternity in there.”
The only thing crueler than life sometimes is its ironies. One of the elder Van Praag’s friends and confidants is a football coach in Florida by the name of George LePorte. LePorte taught chemistry at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018 when a shooter arrived on campus and killed 17 people.
“You really need to connect with each individual player,” LePorte told Van Praag recently. “Because everyone is going to be at a different place.”
Longtime Columbine football coach Andy Lowry reached out. So did the Columbine booster club. Severance offered signs, memorials and a moment of silence. Evergreen officials respectfully declined. The most important thing, they said, was getting normalcy again.
Both schools agreed on a small, personal gesture — a blue, heart-shaped sticker on the back of the Silver Knights’ helmets that featured the Cougars’ logo, the Severance logo, and three words: UKnighted For Evergreen.
“In our program, we are so lucky,” Van Praag said. “Our motto every year is THL — Trust, Honor and Love.
“We are going to love these kids. And once we get to that love piece, they trust us implicitly. And so they will come to us and talk to us (to say), ‘Coach, I’m really struggling.’ As a coach, that’s the greatest compliment you can get. If we have a 15-, 16-year-old kid saying, ‘I love you,’ that’s a big deal for us. We want to get them to that place. And our team is there.”
‘Getting back to football has helped’
The football side is still, understandably, coming along. Slowly.
In their opening offensive series at Severance, the Cougars punted after three plays. Then again, after another three.
The offense sputtered. The defense wore down. The rust was real. Assistant coach Ryan Jensen, the Fort Morgan native and a Super Bowl champ with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, mislaid his hat before the game and had to borrow someone else’s.
Severance used a second-quarter surge to take a 22-0 lead into halftime. The Silver Knights eventually pounded out a 32-0 win before a giddy, glittering homecoming crowd.
Van Praag wouldn’t make excuses after the game. So we will. Over the previous fortnight, the Cougars have practiced at four different sites — the Broncos’ indoor complex, Chatfield High, a local junior high, and their own facility.
Every day was a scramble drill. Severance prep this past week involved two different fields. Kids were padding up at home, padding up in restrooms, dressing and changing wherever they could.
“We prepared well, we liked our plan, but the last two weeks — it’s a struggle,” Van Praag told me. “You’re not practicing on your own home field. And I think we’re going to scrap this and move on quickly. But our kids are resilient; they’ve been great. I have no problem with the effort or what they did. These kids have been through a lot.”
“I mean, for us — we don’t need to watch this film. We know this wasn’t us. This is a wash. We move on. We’re two games from conference play. We have a game next week, and then we’re into conference play. That’s what we have to get ready for.”
They lost a game. They got their normal back. On a long journey home, the first step is often the heaviest.
“I think as much as it can, it felt like a normal football game,” Declan said. “Severance came out and played as hard as they could, which was nice. I’m glad they didn’t show anything different to us. I think we played our hardest, and it was good to get out there.”
How are you doing?
“Getting back to football has helped a lot,” Declan said. “Being able to just feel normal with everything, seeing my teammates, being able to even practice at our own fields, getting back to normal, it’s felt really good.”
As Declan spoke, a player, eye black smudged, hair sopping, stopped and hugged his father tightly. THL.
The coach never stopped believing. And everybody still had their backs. Everybody.
“We love this group,” Van Praag said. The call sheet was gone. The smile returned. “We’ll be back on our field next week. We’ll be back in our building. The routine will be back to normal. That’s the thing that’s most important. And we’ll be OK.”
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