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BROOKSVILLE - Two minutes remained on the clock when the coach got the winner's Gatorade shower. Not long after that, several assistants got one too, but with water-filled coolers.
At a school this size, one bucket of the good stuff per game is enough.
Once the players finished offering their "good games" to the visitors, a few dozen students on the sidelines offered congratulations.
Parents clicked photos as if it were graduation day, eventually getting the team to pose around the scoreboard to capture the momentous occasion.
Hernando Christian Academy's football team won, beating Ocoee Central Florida Christian 42-14.
Big deal? It was if you knew what it took to get there.
* * *Steve Johnson had explored his son's options. With his wife being a teacher at Hernando Christian, a tiny K-12 private school, transferring then-freshman Stephen to another high school made little sense.
But other schools had football.
He asked the Florida High School Athletic Association if a student could play sports at one school while taking classes at another. The answer was no, so the father went ahead with a proposal he had considered for a while.
Football at Hernando Christian.
"My first response was, "We can't even think about this. We're too small, we've got other irons in the fire, it would be bigger than we could probably chew,"' HCA athletic director Jason Kahler said.
By any sensible accounting, that first instinct was probably right. When Johnson's proposal went to the school's board last year, HCA had fewer than 100 students in its high school (the 2004 graduating class was 14) with another 120 or so in the middle school. Eighth- and even seventh-grade students filled out varsity rosters in HCA's ambitious athletic program.
The school had fall soccer, boys golf, volleyball, boys and girls cross country, boys and girls basketball, baseball and softball, participating for the first time in 2003-04 as playoff-eligible programs. Only a gym was on campus, leaving most teams to practice and compete elsewhere.
A $25,000 athletic department budget covered it all, from uniforms to equipment to transportation to the smallest details.
Four much larger public schools in Hernando County offered football, including a new school called Nature Coast Tech that already was siphoning some of the area's best athletes from mainstays Central, Hernando High and Springstead.
HCA could not possibly compete with those schools on the field in the long run, nor would it try. And the money mountain seemed insurmountable. The startup bill for a typical high school football program can exceed $20,000, and annual costs add up to far more than what's required for, say, boys cross country. Despite all that, Johnson found allies in high places.
"We probably had eight to 10 boys that we could have seen leave (without football)," HCA superintendent David Holtzhouse said. "We don't know for sure, but moving into football pretty well locked them into staying here."
Johnson said he could pull it off, having raised about $6,000 in donations from parents and school boosters (more would arrive later). In January, the board agreed to let him start a program.
"I was like, "Yeah, okay, whatever. They'll get it the year after I'm graduating,"' senior Jake Bowe said.
Instead it arrived in time for him and three other seniors to forever join the fraternity of high school football players.
* * *Preseason training camp looked like something reminiscent of the Junction Boys , with players working on a sweltering dirt patch beneath power lines.
In the movie, it was Texas A&M players being molded into champions. At Hernando Christian, it was 160-pound linemen learning how to block and tackle for the first time. Through those first few weeks, new royal-blue tackling dummies were not subjected to much abuse.
Neither were opponents.
The first regular-season play in HCA football history was an 88-yard kickoff return for a touchdown by Indian Rocks Christian in Largo. The kid broke one tackle and was gone, a recurring theme in a 65-0 loss.
Optimism reigned a week earlier after a preseason game at Temple Heights, which HCA lost 24-14 but might have won if not for a turnover and couple of dropped passes in the end zone.
Reality set in once the games counted, and HCA didn't score for almost a month.
After the IRC trouncing the team lost 48-0 at Winter Haven All Saints', then 14-0 at Winter Garden Calvary Christian.
Clearly, this whole football thing was going to take time. HCA had some 25 players. A third had no football experience. Seven were middle-schoolers.
Johnson saw the same mistakes for weeks: missed tackles, dropped passes, special teams miscues galore.
"We had a couple of kids that couldn't catch a cold," the coach said. "It was that bad."
But the team progressed off the field. That dirt patch gave way to a new field across campus, complete with $23,000 worth of new sod, plus goal posts and grandstands.
Funding came from the school's operating budget, as the field would also be used for soccer.
Schoolwide enthusiasm was spectacular from the beginning. Lions fans outnumbered Temple Heights' in the preseason game and the home opener some weeks later at the new field drew 400 spectators.
"When you have 400 people show up to your first home game, you're like, "Wow, this is big,"' Kahler said. "There were people at that football game I haven't seen in my entire life. Generally at basketball games here, you know everybody."
Even the scores didn't matter.
"The enthusiasm, even with all the slaughterings we've taken, has not dropped off," said Sol Whitten, father of eighth-grade lineman Ethan Whitten, between flipping burgers at the concession stand.
The crowd at that first home game revealed another problem no one had foreseen, though a pleasant one to have. Shortly thereafter, someone bought the school a bigger grill.
* * *When you're winning every week, other schools take notice. When you're losing big every week, schools really take notice.
The Lions played an independent schedule that included teams from as far away as Coral Springs. As lopsided losses piled up, other small schools called to ask about securing games for next season.
Throughout it all, Johnson never lost his cool. A former walk-on tight end at Auburn, the 40-year-old started the program, collected $14,000 in donations by the opener and spent it all on uniforms and supplies. The entire program was funded through donations; no school money was required, though players paid $100 to cover increased insurance costs (the usual athletic fee at HCA is $25).
It was a full-time job to go with two others, a Brooksville real-estate business and his longtime job as a Tampa firefighter. Johnson grudgingly accepted a stipend of $1,000 from the school, a bargain for the job he did building a cohesive unit out of the wildly diverse group of players.
His son ended up at quarterback, chosen by the assistant coaches to avoid any controversy.
"I expected him to come out here and yell at us; he was pretty cool," Stephen Johnson said. "He said he has no regrets."
What the coach took the most pride in was how HCA consistently played every minute of every game. Opposing coaches always made a point of complimenting the Lions' fight. Several were shocked to hear that many of the players were freshmen or younger.
One could have heard a pin drop on the home side at Nature Coast when HCA answered an early Sharks touchdown with one of its own. When junior running back Ryan Walczak barreled into the end zone from 9 yards, the visiting Lions trailed 7-6 with four minutes left in the first quarter.
Oh, Hernando Christian never scored again. The final score was 64-6. But in the overall picture, the Lions made a small point in a game at which they served as a homecoming sacrifice to a local team.
"I tip my hat to those guys, they were tough," Nature Coast coach Jamie Joyner said. "They kept coming, they fought hard."
Even more remarkable, no Lions quit the team. One left early in the season after sustaining several minor injuries and another was lost for the season midway through with a broken collarbone, but nobody walked away because he was tired of the losing or the daily grind.
"They said, "This kid will quit, this one won't work,"' Johnson said. "They didn't. They stuck with me to the last play of every game."
* * *The fight finally paid off 10 days ago when HCA beat Central Florida Christian. As usual, there was an early special teams miscue - the Eagles fumbled the opening kickoff yet still returned it 60 yards - but little else went wrong.
Four players combined for five interceptions, including one from 5-foot-3, 120-pound freshman defensive back Josh Dahmer. The offensive outburst was remarkable considering the 65 points the team had scored all season.
"It just put a name on the season," said junior Nate Dahmer, Josh's older brother and one of the team's leaders. "Everybody was like, "First year, you're not going to win anything.' We proved them wrong."
A 1-8 record never felt sweeter. Nate Dahmer said many of the classmates who doubted the team were in the stands, now expressing an interest in playing next season.
HCA plans on playing an independent schedule again in the fall, with designs on entering Class A district play the next season.
"Like it or not, it legitimizes the high school," Holtzhouse said. "If we had to do it over again, we'd still do it."
-- Times staff writer Emily Nipps contributed to this report.