Louisa County quarterback Zacchaeus Jackson tries to pump up his teammates before a home game against Orange County. Louisa County's campus suffered major damage from the recent East Coast earthquake, and then soon after, vandals defaced the school's field.
Photo by Shane Mettlen
Friday evening, less than two hours before kickoff in
Louisa County (Mineral, Va.) while most everyone else was getting ready for the season opener, an out-of-towner passing through was at the local Walgreen's paying for her gum and making chit-chat with the cashier.
"How are you this evening," the teenage employee dutifully asked the strange woman who conspicuously wasn't wearing Louisa Lion green.
"I'm fine," the customer responded with a polite smile. "How about you?"
The boy looked at the ground and grimaced a bit.
"I was doing good until I heard about the football field…"
It was an actual case of adding insult to injury. Rocked less than two weeks earlier by the magnitude-5.8 earthquake that shook the East Coast from New England to Georgia, the people of Louisa County couldn't wait for game time. But when the Lousia County High School coaching staff went to the stadium Friday morning they discovered vandals had spray painted arch-rival Orange County's logo along with the word "LOSE" all over the turf.
Lions' head coach Jonathan Meeks shook his head.
"The nicest thing we have right now is this field."
FOOTBALL MANIABefore Aug. 23, if this county of about 33,000 was the epicenter of anything it would have been high school football mania in Virginia.
Last year's Lions squad won its first 11 games before losing in the second round of the state playoffs and around here the big news was the loss of legendary coach Mark Fischer, who took a job in South Carolina, and star quarterback Kire Worley, who transferred to a school in Richmond.
Hundreds of fans showed up on the first day of August to get their first glimpse of the team at the annual Midnight Madness practice. After that, football, and whether or not Louisa could win another Jefferson District title, was just about all anybody talked about.
"When I go inside of a store, most of the time I still have my practice gear on," sophomore running back
Deon Johnson said. "People ask me, ‘Hey, are y'all going to be any good? I'm going to come see y'all. I get calls from other counties from people that want to come see our games."
Johnson and his teammates were in class, but having trouble focusing on anything except the upcoming season opener when they first felt the shaking. Students and teachers looked at each other, confused. When the light fixtures began to fall and the bookcases tipped over, the confusion grew to panic.
"I started crying," sophomore Carla Robertson, a Lions cheerleader, said. "One of the ceiling tiles almost hit me. Everything around me was falling. We all started running and we got out. It was just terrible. I relive it every night."
As they gathered outside, few knew exactly what was going on. Cell phones reception was out, but news trickled in that millions of people up and down the East Coast could feel the quake, whose epicenter was just a few miles away.
The main school building won't reopen this year, perhaps damaged beyond repair. Students will share a building with middle schoolers when they return to class this week. Officials are still totaling the damage, but so far it exceeds the school district's insurance cap by more than $7 million. About the only good news was no damage was found at the football stadium.
Californians joked about the needless hysteria in cities such as New York and Washington D.C., but in Louisa the devastation and destruction was all too real.
Six players missed Tuesday's practice helping a teammate move out of his family home, which was destroyed. Two others had to find new housing while damage was assessed.
"It can be hard to focus on football when people are trying to get everything out of their house," Johnson said. "But I think it's given us more fuel to run off of, more energy."
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