Friday, Football and Family: "This is what we play for."
Spring football in Illinois kicks off as Glenbrook North plays on remembering a fallen teammate
Matt Purdy didn’t know what to do. That’s not entirely true. He knew what he wanted to do. He just didn’t know how.
Friday night, March 19, would be the first time Glenbrook North football, the team Purdy is the head coach of, took the field since October of 2019.
Then, the Spartans starting quarterback was a promising junior named Dylan Buckner.
In the two weeks of practices leading up to the 2021 spring season opener, the Spartans were faced with a daunting football-related challenge.
How do they replace Buckner, who would have been starting his third varsity season this spring. In January, Buckner committed suicide.
Without their quarterback and captain, Purdy was forced to grapple with a monumental, non-football question.
On the day of their first game, how to remember ‘Buck’, as coaches and teammates affectionately called him, in an appropriate manner.
“I went back and forth on how to do it,” Purdy said. “This is more than a football game.”
Never before has that been more true at Glenbrook North.
Everything looked like a football Friday night when I pulled into the Glenbrook North High School parking lot at about 6:15 p.m. for a 7:00 p.m. kickoff.
The lot was starting to fill up. Students and parents started to trickle in.
One stark difference between March and a typical opening weekend in August—the temperature. Shorts and t-shirts, if worn at all, were layered under jeans, sweatshirts and overall outerwear. It reminded me of Ravinia in early June (minus the BYOB).
Signs dotted the entrance area of the stadium reminding fans to bring “vouchers.”
The voucher idea is the brainchild of Glenbrook North Athletic Director John Catalano. It’s a response to the Illinois Department of Public Health recommendation, adopted by the Illinois High School Association, to limit the number of spectators at an outdoor event to 20 percent capacity.
With a seating capacity of approximately 1,750 for the home grandstands, Catalano issued 350 vouchers for Friday’s game.
“We gave them to players, cheerleaders, faculty members, anyone who wanted them,” Catalano said “I was handing them out to kids during the week, asking ‘do you want to go to the game?”
Rather than take a ‘closed’ approach to fan participation, Catalano promoted an ‘open’ atmosphere by printing off 150 vouchers for Evanston fans, the visiting team. Early in the week before the game, he dropped the vouchers off with Wildkits Athletic Director Chris Livatino, who distributed the vouchers to team members and others.
(This ‘open’ policy, the same for all schools in the Central Suburban League, is in direct contrast to other conferences in the CSL’s regional footprint, the North Suburban and Chicago Catholic League/East Suburban Conference. They have adopted a ‘closed’ policy in not allowing visiting fans to attend games).
As Evanston players walked on the field for pre-game, they could look to their left and spot their mom, dad, uncle, grandpa, girlfriend or whomever they invited, sitting or standing in the bleachers.
The voucher system? Catalano put a few signs up and had an operations person at the front entrance instructing people on how to get into the stadium.
“Take your voucher to the ticket window!” is all the person had to say.
Everyone knew what to do.
An apt descriptor of Friday’s atmosphere at William Lutz Stadium in Northbrook?
Subdued.
Students were there, sitting together. But not making much noise. There were cheerleaders. No pep band.
Players and coaches, whom typically block out fan noise, even admitted to noticing how tepid the atmosphere was.
“I don’t typically hear anything. But there was a time I was like, ‘it’s pretty quiet,’” Purdy said.
“I was psyching myself out, but once we got on the field, things settled down,” sophomore center Patrick Mahoney said. “Things were a little quieter (with the crowd). It had a different feel.”
Football games at Glenbrook North are similar to many others in Northern Cook County that take on an ‘event’ type environment on Friday nights. Massive student sections. Hundreds of junior high boys and girls playing in the open areas and doing everything but watching the football game.
The pep band. The pregame drum line.
“Usually that first game the band is walking through the hallway. Our drum line is one of our favorite things in the world,” Purdy said. “Some of that energy was missing.”
Glenbrook North drew a tough week 1 match up against Evanston.
The Wildkits have a ton of speed, on display from the opening possession and throughout the game. After forcing a Spartans punt to start the game, Evanston ran the punt return back for a touchdown only for it to be called back for an illegal block. From there, it took Evanston three plays to find the end zone again.
Jamari Jenkins, a 205-pound junior tight end, took a short pass from Wildkits quarterback Sean Cruz and sprinted past Spartan defenders for a 58-yard touchdown run.
Two possessions later, Sebastian Cheeks, a junior RB/LB with offers from Notre Dame and Wisconsin, took a hand off and a few seconds later, was in the end zone after completing an 81-yard run and 14-0 Evanston lead.
But early in second quarter, the Spartans got a big play from their new quarterback.
Avery Burow won the quarterback job six days earlier during a ‘21’ drill.
Eleven-on-11. Strictly passing. Spartan coaches liked his smarts and ability to make plays when the pocket breaks down.
“What we like about him is his escapability,” Purdy said. “He moves well and can get out and go.”
During a play early in the second quarter, Burow had to improvise.
A Wildkit rusher closing in, Burow darted forward, keeping his head up and down the field. To his right, junior receiver Ryan Henschel emerged, free from defenders. Burow threw a dart in the direction of Henschel. who caught the pass and ran 30 plus yards after the catch into the end zone for a touchdown. The entire play took 70 yards and was a moment of hope and promise for an otherwise outmatched Spartans team.
On that play, Burow looked like the leader and playmaker the Spartans desperately needed.
“He has a good arm,” senior offensive lineman Mihailo Milutinovic said of Burow. “He has that (wide) receiver athleticism.”
“I think Avery played great considering the circumstances. I think he showed he’s got the job and is grateful for it,” senior two-way player Jackson Carsello said. Carsello is a 6-foot-5, 275-pound Northwestern recruit at offensive line but also played on the defensive line Friday night.
“No one can replace Dylan.”
A few minutes after 6 p.m. Friday, Purdy gathered his team into the school’s field house.
He talked about family and about how family members pass on.
Glenbrook North lost members of its football family over this past year.
There was Chuck Hansen, a former head coach at the school and assistant on the 1974 state championship team. In January, Harold “Sam” Samorian, the head coach of that famous 1974 undefeated team that remains the lone state title team in school history, passed away at 89 years of age.
Also in January, Buckner, died.
Purdy finally came up with an idea for how to remember ‘Buck’ and the other fallen Spartans.
He had stickers made up with the word ‘Family’ printed on them.
“I talked to the captains before (Carsello, Burow, senior Luke Henry and Drake Marquez) and they liked it,” Purdy said.
Before the game, Purdy gave the stickers to his players and they put the sticker on their helmets.
On the left side.
“That’s where your heart is,” Purdy said. “Everyone holds family so deep in their heart.”
During the game, on the sidelines, Buckner’s helmet, the ‘Family’ sticker attached, rested near the Spartan bench.
After the game, won by Evanston 48-6, I asked Carsello and Milutinovic about the continued presence of their friend and teammate, ‘Buck.’
“We’ve talked about how the season is for Dylan and he was present throughout,” Carsello said.
Said Milutinovic: “Everybody can say they had some of (Buckner) him with us when we were playing. Everybody has been going through such a hard time for the last year and what happened to Dylan just made it harder. This is why we are here, this is what we are working for, we have to make up for the people that we lost. We are family, this is what we play for”
Carsello added how the game was not the way the Spartans had wanted to start the year but with a young offensive line and first-year quarterback, growing pains are to be expected. They will get better, he said.
Just by playing, Carsello said, they had already won.
“We fought hard this whole situation,” Carsello said. “We fought the IDPH (Illinois Department of Public Health), the governor (J.B. Pritzker) and the IHSA (Illinois High School Association) for this and we had this opportunity and the one we fought for is the one we are going to take.”
A football game was played Friday night in Northbrook. The end result was not what the Spartans wanted. There will be another game this Friday (Glenbrook South) and if all goes well, another one after that and three more before the season ends in April.
But Glenbrook North, as winter officially transitions to spring, is a football community still emotionally fragile from the events of the last year, and from the first three months of 2021. There is a ways to go before the healing ends. Friday was a step forward.
At the end of our postgame interview, Purdy said there were plenty of things to fix about his football team.
He had something else on his mind as the lights were turned off at William Lutz Field late Friday night.
“My son (Ryan, a swimmer at the University of Iowa) drove in from school. His car pulls up at two o’clock (Friday afternoon). I haven’t seen him since October,” Purdy said. “I’m going to go spend some time with him.”