South Lakes Team Did It The Right Way

RESTON, VA — Last summer, South Lakes High Coach Jason Hescock held one of his parent coffee sessions. It was a warm Saturday morning, and the air condition inside the room where it was held had not taken effect.

I sat there, the father of a rising senior, listening as the coach described all the community involvement he would need to have a successful program. Concession stand workers. Chain gang. Pregame meals. Feed the boys during two-a-days. On and on he went describing all the duties, and on and on I went finding a reason where each one was just a bit impossible for me personally.

Then he said, “And we need someone to be like a sportswriter for the team and write about us for the school website and wherever else …” And I was like, “Bullseye.”

He got me. I’d been a sportswriter for nearly 30 years. I covered the great South Lakes football team that made the state semifinals back in the early 1990s, and I covered the Grant Hill-led Seahawk basketball dynasty and the Pinkman Brothers-led South Lakes baseball team.

I could do this. It required coming to all the games, which I definitely planned to do. I asked my wife, as I always do before volunteering, and said what she always says: “You know you’re going to do it no matter what I say.”

So I covered the team – two stories a week; one a preview of the upcoming, then a story on the game. I got to mention my son twice because others mentioned him in quotes. But I also got to mention a lot of his friends and kids I had coached in youth leagues through the years and to celebrate their success.

Our season didn’t turn out so well. We lost our first two, won the next two, then lost the last six. South Lakes went from winning all its Concorde District games in 2023 to losing them all in 2024. It was painful – they led in all but one district game and lost two on literally the last play. And when our final chance to make the playoffs came down to having to beat Madison, Centreville and Westfield on successive weeks, I knew – we knew; all the Seahawks fans knew – that we were in serious trouble.

But the worse things got, the more I came to admire this team – its coaches, its players and its devoted fans. It’s much harder to go 2-8 than to go 8-2. Every mistake is magnified. Every coaching decision is high stakes and difficult and fraught with chances for failure. Every week it gets harder to generate the hope and the effort and the momentum to compete.

And there were moments when it looked like the team would not hold up. The 28-point third quarter they allowed against Centreville. The 21-point first quarter the next week against Westfield. But even in both situations, the Seahawks found a way to fight back – albeit unsuccessfully.

But looking back on it, I am just fine with this season. Our coaches took the kids of Reston and did the best they could with them. There were no mysterious players coming out of the blue, no one brought in because they had found a way to be considered homeless. Last year, the team had 35 seniors who held 20 of the 22 starting spots. The quarterback was the region offensive MVP, and several members of the defense ended up on the all-region team. It was South Lakes’s year – a 10-0 regular season and a tragic and shocking loss in the first round of the playoffs.

And this year, all those starters were replaced with people who had been in the shadows and had to learn on the fly. In some cases they learned fabulously – Cody Wood went from a part-time player to a 700-yard rusher with a team-best 17 touchdowns. Nathan Deglel went from a sixth-man type player on the defensive line to a full-grown man who stood tall no matter how badly things went for the Seahawks at times. In others, there was less progress.

When the season ended at Westfield, the South Lakes parents and fans made a tunnel for the players to leave the field through. They stayed until every last player straggled down from the bench area. They applauded and congratulated and hugged and cried and hurt for a team that had tried really hard but fallen very short.

As we read the news of the upheaval in the playoffs, there’s nothing that will change the fact that my son will have been a part, as a senior, of a 2-8 team that missed the playoffs by a mile. But nothing will change the fact that we did what we did the right way with the community and the players and the coaches we had.