The 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers became the first team in NFL history to go through a 14-game season without a win or a tie, the NFL Detroit Lions went 0-16 in 2008 and the 1899 Cleveland Spiders major league baseball team suffered 101 road losses.
Houston’s Jefferson Davis High School once suffered an 80-game football losing streak, so seven games into the 2010 high school season without a win shouldn’t look quite so hopeless to McMinn Central, one of 22 winless teams in Tennessee, or to Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe just across the state line in Georgia.
“I’ve been down that road. I think we had the [state] record [for consecutive losses] for a while,” said Tyner coach Wayne Turner, who last missed the postseason in 1993. “Whether you’re a head coach or an assistant, those days aren’t much fun.”
Turner suffered through a 51-game losing streak during his years as an assistant coach at Kirkman Technical High, which was closed in the early 1990s.
“There were seasons we were playing with 19-20 kids,” Turner said. “It wasn’t a cakewalk, but I felt more for the kids than myself or the head coach. They’d work hard every day and show up every Friday night.”
“This streak is about building character, and I believe we’ll be better next year because of it,” McMinn Central junior defensive end Tony Preskitt said. “I think we’re learning lessons that will keep us trying long after we have graduated from college. We will have learned about handling adversity.”
Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe will have 10 starters returning on each side of the ball next year. The Warriors have endured no fewer than five season-ending knee injuries.
Coach Todd Windham knew 2010 might be a lean season after 15 starters graduated from a playoff team. But Windham lived through a winless season at Lookout Valley in his first year as the Yellow Jackets’ coach.
“Things move in cycles,” he said. “We went from 0-10 my first year to 3-7 the next year to 8-4 and the playoffs by the third season. You deal with your own frustrations and those of your players and their parents.”
Having dealt with a winless season previously doesn’t mean it gets easier with age or experience.
“I think as a coach you always want your team to get better whether it’s Week 7 and you’re 0-7 or it’s Week 7 and you’re 7-0,” Windham said. “You’re always looking to get better from one week to the next.”
McMinn Central is coming off one of the best three-year periods in the school’s football history. The Chargers were 9-2 in 2007 and 2008 and 7-4 in 2009, Josh Goodin’s first season as a head coach. They lost a lot of talent – last week they had two senior starters along with a handful of juniors, a half-dozen freshmen and another five or six sophomores.
“We are extremely young and we started the year very inexperienced. Playing all those young guys is going to bode well for the future,” said Goodin, whose team has endured mercy-rule beatings in six losses. “I don’t think anybody has run up the score on us. It’s just that right now the best we have aren’t good enough to compete with other teams’ No. 1’s.”
Despite the lopsided losses, Goodin has found for himself what coaches mean when they talk about the resilience of youth.
“I have had a short head-coaching career, but when you combine that with my years as an assistant, this is the most enjoyable group I’ve been around,” he said. “I have a great time on the practice field. We all get frustrated on Friday nights, but the kids make it easier to handle because they’re really good kids.”
There was a point when Goodin questioned his decision to move to an option offense and other things. He questioned everything about the Chargers program, he said, and the only things he found lacking were an abundance of finances and wins.
“You come to our practice without knowing we haven’t won a game, and you’d never know whether we were 0-7 or 7-0,” he said. “I can’t say a single bad thing about the players’ effort, whether it’s lifting weights, watching film or practicing. It’s there, but right now it isn’t translating to Friday nights.”
To Turner, Windham, Goodin and most of their peers, success is so much more than wins or losses. They enjoy seeing former players who have done well in various ways apart from sports.
As one of the coaches said, “If it was just about wins and losses, I might wonder about my chosen profession. If I have wondered, it has been a fleeing thought. You’re teaching kids, helping them through what can be tough times in their lives, and you’re shaping the leaders of tomorrow. What better profession could there be?”