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Losses rock victorious teams
By RYAN DAVIS © St. Petersburg Times, published October 3, 2000 Undefeated isn't supposed to feel like this. "The fire doesn't burn as bright," said Johnnie Clower Jr., the coach of the undefeated Weightman Middle School football team. "It still burns, but the flame isn't the same." Hidden behind the blue helmets, blue pompoms and repeated victory is unimaginable loss. Early this school year, two cheerleaders' mothers died within two weeks. Less than a week later, the football coach's father -- Dade City community leader and barbecue king Johnnie Clower Sr. -- suffered a massive stroke. He is clinging precariously to life. The tragedies blindsided an athletic community on an otherwise amazing run. The Weightman football team has won 19 of its last 20 games and won or tied for five consecutive Pasco County championships. The cheerleaders who line the football field have finished in the top three at the American Open for the past five years. For them, this wasn't a brush with death. It was a head-on collision. "They were devastated," cheerleading coach Sharon Morris said. Morris, who tries to block out trouble by turning middle-school pressure into a positive influence that leads to good grades and behavior, couldn't shield her cheerleaders from this. "They're at the point where they go this way or that," said Morris, one hand going up, the other diving toward the floor. At Weightman, they've seen several seemingly good kids turn the wrong way. Ten kids -- two Weightman students and eight Wesley Chapel High School students -- who live in the stricken cheerleaders' neighborhood, Meadow Pointe, were recently charged with the worst reported act of vandalism at a county school for their alleged ransacking Labor Day weekend of Sand Pine Elementary. A Weightman eighth grader was charged with making a fake bomb threat Sept. 19 to the school. Morris helped organize support efforts for her cheerleaders during their times of need. They think of themselves as a big family, and they showered their devastated teammates with gift certificates, enormous snack baskets and coupons for the Limited clothing store. But the girls' mothers are still gone. "Right now," Morris said, "is when things are going to get really rough." As co-captain of the cheerleading team, Lauren Betancourt has spent many an afternoon perched atop the arms of three teammates. It's her first year at the top of the pyramid, but typically Lauren knows when she is about to fall. "If your ankle starts to roll or your foot starts moving a lot, you might unlock your knee," the eighth-grader said, "then you just crumble." But the 13-year-old never saw this one coming. She never thought her mother, 40-year-old Annette Hulley, would lose her battle with cancer -- the non-Hodgkins lymphoma that surrounded her heart and killed her Aug. 24. "I just kinda deal," Lauren said. "I don't know how. I don't know . . . "She's the person that was always there." If the cheerleading team is a family, Hulley was, by most accounts, the unofficial mother. After practice, she loaded the kids without rides into her white Dodge Caravan and took them home. Before she lost it, Hulley had the same brown hair as her daughter. And the big bluish-green eyes. But she didn't want her daughter to get into the same teenage trouble she had, Lauren said. That's why she liked that Lauren had taken to cheerleading. The images of Hulley dancing the Macerena in the stands with a scarf on her head stick in the minds of captains Samantha Jackson and Bippi Boyett. Lauren knew her mother was embarrassed to be bald. And that's why it meant even more that she came to all the games. "Don't worry," coaches said Hulley told her daughter just before her death. "I'll be there. I'll be the angel for your team." Rachel Plate thought the news that Lauren's mother had died was a nasty rumor. Seeing Lauren's tears made it real. "I kept thinking," Rachel said, " "What if that happened to me?' " Twelve days later, it did. Her mom, 39-year-old Donna Plate, died Sept. 5 from a series of complications after her liver and kidneys failed. Her parents were divorced. Rachel didn't live with her mother in Tampa. She lives five miles north with her father. But that didn't stop her mother from calling to check on her, Rachel said. Some nights her mother, who tried out for the cheerleading team in high school several times before making it as a junior, would call her every 20 minutes to check her progress on math problems. Maybe Rachel should have seen her mother's death coming. She didn't. "It was just a carry-over from what happened to Lauren's mom," Rachel said. "It's not like a one-shot thing. Lauren's mom inflicted it and with mine, it sunk in deep." The cheerleaders learned Rachel's mother had died minutes before this season's first football game, just eight days after they had attended Hulley's funeral. "We've got to pull it together," Morris said she told the team. "We'll go ahead and cry and get it out of our system, and then we'll wipe our tears and go out there." Plenty of Weightman-blue makeup ran down young faces that night. After seven years as an assistant, that game was 32-year-old Johnnie Clower Jr.'s first as a head coach. It was the last game his father saw. On Sept. 11, six days after the game, Clower Sr., 56, suffered a massive stroke. The namesake of Johnnie's Bar-B-Q in Dade City has not fully regained consciousness since. After the game, Clower Jr.'s father delivered a critique. He told his son to work on his kicking team and to tell his offensive linemen to run to line of scrimmage each play. Now Clower just wants his father to do something -- anything. His hope: "He might be able to understand us when we talk to him or communicate by squeezing our hands." Without a word, Clower Jr. said, his dad would be proud of his undefeated team. The routine continues at Weightman. Clower's football team keeps winning. Lauren and Rachel's cheerleading team keeps building the trust it will need for the national competition. "You just go up, and sometimes you fall," Lauren said. "Usually when you fall, they catch you. That's how you develop trust. "If you fall and they catch you, you know they will always catch you in everything." Lauren still perches atop her teammates on the sidelines and stares into a crowd that will always be at least one person too small. "It's harder looking into the stands," Lauren said, "but it's fun being on top."
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