Five hundred and nine days later, the memories have become rather hazy.
It was back on Nov. 9, 2019, that the Franklinville/Ellicottville football team played in the Section 6 Class D championship game at then-New Era Field.
On that day, the Titans had dreams of completing an unbeaten season and winning the program’s first sectional title since 2015. Instead, Clymer/Sherman/Panama avenged a 24-8 regular-season loss to F/E, handing Jason Marsh’s team a 22-0 defeat.
And though nobody could have foreseen it, that was the last time a Big 30 football team from Section 6 took the field.
Until now.
Nearly 17 months since that otherwise unremarkable day became an unintended footnote in the story of pandemic-era football, local squads are finally getting the chance to don their helmets and hit the gridiron for real. And that unprecedented, and abbreviated, season kicks off tonight (7 o’clock) when Salamanca hosts Maple Grove on its new turf field at Vets Park.
BARRING catastrophe (and two teams, F/E and Allegany-Limestone have already had Week 1 games postponed due to COVID-related pauses from their opponent), this weekend will mark an end to the nearly year-long saga that has been high school football in Section 6.
Indeed, in that time, teams went from not being able to meet or train on school grounds to learning in June that the section was actually going to add an extra game (Week 0) to the schedule … of all years; from having its season delayed and then pushed to the spring to having to watch their counterparts in Pennsylvania pull off a fall campaign with few COVID-related problems; from wondering if they’d actually have a season at all to being told they’d be strapping it up by April 1.
And now here they are, willingly and eagerly attempting to carry out perhaps the most chaotic task in this truly chaotic year for high school athletics:
Start practice on March 21, when the ground is still frozen and a number of players are still playing basketball, take 10 days to prepare for arguably the most physically demanding sport at this level and then go out and bang heads after having not done so for the last 500-plus days.
Is it the most ideal way to stage a season in a sport as inherently violent as football? Unequivocally, no. But clearly, that’s a risk they’re willing to take, and a situation they’re willing to accept, for the tradeoff of having any season at all.
FOR Section 6, it’s been a long time coming.
Thirty-five states managed to hold their seasons in the fall, including Pennsy, for whom a separate Big 30 all-star team was named in December. New York is one of 12 states that is set (or has already started) to play a spring season while three others — Connecticut, Hawaii and Maine — remain in flux, per maxpreps.com. And even the neighboring teams in Section 5 have already logged the first two weeks of their season.
But for those Cattaraugus County squads — Salamanca tonight, Pioneer tomorrow and Olean, Randolph, Cattaraugus-Little Valley and Portville on Saturday — it will presumably have been well worth the wait, when barely two months ago this weekend was anything but a promise.
And, as easy as it is to forget, almost all of those teams had solid seasons in 2019, making for at least a strong starting point in the spring of ‘21.
Indeed, six of the eight Section 6 programs made at least the playoff semifinals that fall, the most to make it that far since 2000, a notable achievement given that there were as many as 12 such programs earlier this millennium. One (F/E) played in a championship game while two others (Olean, Portville) came within a touchdown of doing the same. And even some of the lesser successful teams, Salamanca (4-5) and Allegany-Limestone (3-5) turned in respectable campaigns in their first year under new coaches (Chad Bartoszek and Tom Callen, respectively).
How much of that momentum could possibly carry over some 17 months later?
Given what some of these teams bring back, potentially quite a bit.
F/E AND Portville return nine and 11 starters, respectively from teams that went 8-1 and 7-2, including two of the area’s most individually talented players in Logan Frank (the reigning Big 30 Player of the Year) and Jayden Lassiter. Olean returns a pair of Big 30 all-stars (Nick Pantuso and A.J. Addotta), its starting quarterback and, per coach Phil Vecchio, “a host of others who were a big part of our season last year.”
Randolph, not terribly far removed from a stretch of dominance, is a year older. Pioneer, behind two returning Class B-1 first team all-stars (Jordan King, Logan Ellis), is hoping to once again compete for a B title. And Salamanca, with 10 starters back and Bartoszek on the sideline, also has its sights set high.
On paper, there are a handful of Big 30 teams that figure to compete for one of their class’s four playoff spots this spring (in this truncated campaign, the playoffs will consist of only the semifinals and final). All, though, given how this last year has gone, are happy merely to finally be taking the field once more.
(J.P. Butler, Bradford Publishing Company group sports editor, can be reached at jbutler@oleantimesherald.com)
