Joyful Noise: Spring Football at Loyola
Two Chicago Catholic League greats renew their rivalry as Rambler students loudly cheer them on
(Photo Credit: Loyola Academy)
John Holecek lowered his mask for a moment.
He had just spent the last 10 minutes answering questions about how his Loyola Academy Ramblers football team comfortably beat Mt. Carmel 35-17 at John Hoerster Field in Wilmette, IL on March 27.
One question asked of Holecek, the Ramblers head coach, was of the meaning of football in 2021. Loyola had not played on its home field in almost 17 months. With that question, Holecek pulled his head back, yanked his mask away from his mouth and took a second to gather himself.
“These kids have been through so much. So much,” Holecek said, his voice trailing off.
Football coaches are emotional people by nature. And minutes before, Loyola had beat a team in Mt. Carmel that in two previous meetings, 2019 and 2018, had nipped the Ramblers in nail-biting fashion. The current crop of Loyola seniors were freshman the last time the Ramblers had toppled the Caravan, in 2017.
“They are our rivals,” Loyola senior running back Vaughn Pemberton said of Mt. Carmel.
“We wanted this game so bad,” Ramblers senior quarterback J. T. Thomas said.
But Holecek’s emotional admission, of how what took place that afternoon was more than a football game, but a celebration of life, reveals a rawness lying just under the surface for all involved in this, the most unusual of all spring seasons in Illinois interscholastic sports history.
For the first week of this historic 2021 spring season, Loyola hit the road.
The Ramblers took a long bus ride to Chicago’s south side (7740 S. Western Ave.) to play St. Rita. Loyola needed a late special teams play and touchdown to outlast the talented Mustangs, 7-3.
(Photo Credit: Gary Middendorf)
No Rambler fans were inside St. Rita’s home stadium (Doyle Stadium) for the March 19 game due to the Chicago Catholic League’s ban on visiting spectators.
In the days after that St. Rita game, public health officials raised the spectator limit to 25 percent from 20 percent. That caused CCL leaders to re-think their policy for the conference’s week two games.
“We wanted to find a way to let visiting fans come,” Loyola Athletic Director Genevieve Atwood said.
Atwood allocated two tickets for each Mt. Carmel player. The parking lot at Loyola Saturday afternoon was filled with cars being driven by Caravan moms and dads and other relatives.
Loyola’s home grandstand is large—seating between 3-4,000. Adding in all the open areas around the stadium, the bench seating just off the main entrance, the stadium can easily add several thousand more and Atwood said could fit “10,000 people inside” and has done so or certainly close in recent years with the Ramblers being in the state championship mix every season.
A massive crowd would have gathered for a late summer or fall Loyola-Mt. Carmel game in a non-Covid year. But the capacity limit last Saturday left for wide empty gaps in the bleachers and available parking 20 minutes before kick off.
(I did spot one RV trailer in the parking lot but no one tailgating).
Vibrant sights and sounds were everywhere—open concessions, the pep band and multi-generational stream of fans that only CCL games provide. Just being around that many people at a sporting event felt normal and comfortable.
But the majority of the ambiance generated upon entrance to the stadium came from the student section. Yes, the student section.
Remember them?
They jumped. They screamed. They made noise.
They were a distraction from the game. That’s just what they were supposed to do.
Whether it be singing along to the remixed version of Cascada’s “Every Time We Touch” or engaging in open dialogue with Ramblers placekicker Nathan Van Zelst (“We trust you can get one point!”) They did what young people are supposed to do at a football game.
They created joyful atmosphere.
Atwood said early in the planning process for the first home game, she wanted seniors to be prioritized. That’s who made up the student section—just seniors.
Dressed in hard hats and safety vests, they put on a show.
Last week, I wrote about the Glenbrook North-Evanston game. And how the gentle atmosphere inside the stadium that night was noticed by coaches and players.
I asked the same question to Ramblers players after the game.
Could they hear the student section?
“Yes, yes,” Daniels said, emphatically.
“We heard them. It was great to have them here,” Pemberton said.
Another forgot-I-missed-but-so-happy-to-remember moment from last Saturday?
Post-game, players sprinting to the bleachers to celebrate with their classmates.
I don’t know if a more marvelous expression of youthful exuberance exists in sports.
The last time a similar scene took place at Hoerster Field? November 9, 2019 when the Ramblers beat Glenbard West 28-27 in a Class 8A second round playoff game.
November 2019 was a long time ago and seems more distant than it actually is.
This season’s version of the Loyola Academy football team gave everyone reason to celebrate. Because it’s a damn good team.
(Never a certainty in the Midwest, the weather was slightly better last Saturday than at the playoff game in late fall 2019. When the sun poked through early after kick off, it reached 60 degrees. Of course that didn’t last as more clouds rolled in and the temperature dropped but for late March, no complaints)
“He’s a bad ass dude,” Holecek said multiple times of Pemberton, his 6-foot, 215-pound bullhorn of a running back, after the Ramblers finished off the Caravan.
Here are a few examples of what Pemberton did to earn the candid praise of his coach.
*He scored the Ramblers first touchdown, a two-year run that gave Loyola a 7-3 lead with 24.8 seconds left in the first quarter.
*Mt. Carmel scored two second quarter touchdowns to tighten the game at 21-17 heading into halftime. Loyola got the ball first to start the second half and proceeded to go on a 11-play, 80-yard scoring drive capped by a Wildcat formation four-yard touchdown run from Pemberton. “You can’t stop him,” Daniels said of Pemberton. “That Wildcat play, no one can stop it.”
*In the fourth quarter, Loyola leading 28-17, the game became The Vaughn Show. The ultimate Ice Man finished off the Caravan with a 29-yard touchdown gallop with 2:43 remaining. Pemberton’s stats on the day—23 carries, 125 yards, three touchdowns and an additional 67 yards in receiving—clearly showed him to be the best offensive player on the field. But when a defense knows what’s coming and still can’t stop it, there’s an intangible emotional blow to the unit trying to do the stopping, and an intangible emotional lift to the unit that knows it has The Guy.
‘You give him the ball. We’re not going to hide it,” Holecek said. “Ball State (where Pemberton will play in college) is getting themselves a heckuva football player.”
(Photo Credit: Journal-Topics)
In a non-Covid season, the win for Loyola would mark a power shift in the Class 8A and 7A (Mt. Carmel’s class) playoff seedings. But of course there is no state postseason this spring, so the CCL Blue Division, shared by the Ramblers and Caravan, is now Loyola’s to lose.
“We got beat by a really good football team,” Mt. Carmel coach Jordan Lynch said, who’s Caravan team lost its first game since the 2018 season. “We made some mistakes but Loyola just beat us.”
Atwood glanced frequently in the direction of the boisterous student section during the game, but not with the skeptical eye of a disapproving adult. No, quite the opposite.
The crazy bubble of Ramblers seniors, for her, redeemed the school’s decision to be senior-focused with its student ticket allotment.
“We just wanted to do something for these kids,” she said. “They deserve it.”
Atwood admitted the circumstance with the student section could be a one-off.
Although the students were masked, the six-feet social distance guideline still recommended by public heath officials for outdoor sporting events was impossible to follow throughout the game and the optics of it all may not be something Loyola administrators will have the stomach for by the Ramblers next home game, April 10 against Benet Academy.
“We’ll have to see,” Atwood said. “We’ll re-evaluate before our next game.”
That’s sensible. This year especially, a constant reassessing of game day operations is essential.
But my hope is whomever is in charge of these decisions at Loyola attended the game last Saturday. I hope they saw what I saw and what everyone else witnessed.
That of a celebration not just of football, but of life.
How that—getting on with life—is more vital to our nation’s future, and that of young adults, than any counter argument that leads with ‘well, IDPH recommends this…”
Blah, blah.
Let them play and let them shout, dance and sing.
Let’s have more of what we had last Saturday at Loyola.