It was just before last Friday night slipped into Saturday morning when Lance Rorex emerged from the Lookout Valley football field house, breathed in a satisfied gulp of cool air and wondered how on earth it could get any better.
A few hours earlier, butterflies the size of pterodactyls had fluttered around in his stomach as he walked from that locker room to the field for his first game as the Yellow Jackets’ head coach. But along with two other former Jackets – longtime coach and defensive coordinator David Dinger and offensive coordinator Chad Rogers – Rorex guided the team to its first win since 2014, snapping a miserable 19-game losing streak.
So as he stepped through the late-night quiet toward his Ford F-150 pickup truck, the nerves had been replaced by the contentment of having been a part of something truly special, and the only thing he wanted was to find a way to reproduce the electricity of that night.
“I will never forget that feeling of walking into the locker room after the game and seeing our kids smiling and laughing and jumping up and down,” Rorex said. “We all kind of lost control for a few minutes and had fun with it, yelling and celebrating. Our juniors had never won a high school football game. One kid was in tears because he was so happy. We understand it was just one game. But to get that monkey off our backs, it’s hard to put into words what it meant to a lot of people.”
Lance Rorex is 1-0 as Lookout Valley’s football head coach, and the win in his debut last week ended a 19-game losing streak for the program.
The Lookout Valley community always has had a special atmosphere – just five minutes from downtown but maintaining a tight-knit, small-town feel where neighbors are actually neighborly and supportive of the bantam-sized school.