Wesley Chapel has not won a playoff game. Undefeated in the regular season, the players want to win for their coach.
By GREG AUMAN
Published November 14, 2003
WESLEY CHAPEL - One by one, the 17 Wildcats seniors walked through two lines of teammates then took a final run at a tackling dummy, a ritual they had eagerly awaited since their freshman year.
Student and faculty ring the football field and cheer for the players as they finish what could be their final practice as Wesley Chapel. John Castelamare calls the annual ceremony "Last Hit," but the Wildcats had a different perspective on its finality Thursday: It really doesn't have to be.
The Wildcats (10-0) head into tonight's playoff opener against Robinson with their second undefeated regular season in three years. They also have vivid memories of how their last 10-0 season ended, with a first-round thud and a disappointing loss to Wauchula Hardee. What can set this season apart would be the school's first playoff victory.
"To win this one would be awesome," said guard Ryan Bethell, who has seen the Wildcats lose their playoff openers in each of the past two seasons.
If Wesley Chapel's seniors feel overdue for a playoff win, they're much more motivated to win one for Castelamare, who has not won in the postseason in three decades of coaching.
"You can be 10-0 and lose in the first round and not be anything," said receiver Pat Cushman, who has seven touchdown receptions. "When you win a playoff game, now that's something. This is a startover now. One week and you can be out."
Castelamare's players want to win for him most because of his commitment to them. They saw that on the first day of spring practice, when he showed up for drills just hours after he had flipped his pickup truck in a frightening accident on his morning drive to school.
Castelamare was bleeding from a cut on his head, had a bruised rib from the car sliding along the road on the driver's side. He lost his glasses, so he couldn't read the accident report he was asked to sign. He lost his cell phone in the wreck, and when he asked to borrow someone else's, they asked him to use his other ear so he wouldn't bleed on it.
What he didn't lose was his insistence on being at practice eight hours later, when his wife drove him over in a rented car on which he got blood, bandaged up and sore from the wreck but there for his players on the first day of drills. He'd take one day off this fall, the first his seniors could remember him taking, when his daughter went in for arthroscopic knee surgery. His players feel it wouldn't be right to take one play off on the field.
"He wants this season to be something to remember," Cushman said.
Castelamare said he thought only of his family as his car skidded along, so he's thankful for his football team but more thankful for his wife and his daughters, for seat belts and airbags. Football means enough to him that he already bores his daughters with stories of his first 10-0 season, so he wants his players to have something they can share with their children someday.
"I told them they should feel proud, that they're going to talk about this the rest of their lives," he said. "When little Bruno sits in your lap someday, you're going to talk about this. ... Now we have to get this playoff win thing taken care of."
