Watching De La Salle play football will be a treat

  • By Larry Henry / Herald Columnist
  • Thursday, August 26, 2004 9:00pm
  • Sports

SEATTLE – Rob Meadow was almost an hour late for our interview.

What would have happened if he’d ever been late for a football practice at De La Salle High School, he was asked.

“They’d just tell you to leave the field,” he said. “That’d be worse than any kind of drill they could put you through.”

He has first-hand knowledge.

His junior year he was a few minutes late for a Saturday morning film review after a game the night before. He remembers walking into the room, his coach sternly looking at him and uttering “leave.”

No screaming, no shouting, just a one-word command.

Hurt?

“Oh yeah,” Meadow said. “I learned my lesson after that. I was a half-hour early to everything.”

Good football teams have discipline. On and off the field. But not many coaches send a player home for one slight slip-up. Run the stadium steps. Fine him if it’s an NFL player.

But tell him to vacate the premises?

Maybe that’s one thing you have to do to be better than just a good football team. Which De La Salle High School in Concord, Calif., is not.

A team that goes 7-2 might be described as good. How then would you describe the De La Salle Spartans?

Unbelievable? Incredible? Stupendous?

Please. Save the trite adjectives for the small stuff: 116 wins, a .406 batting average, 73 home runs.

Seriously, what word do you hang on a team that has won 151 consecutive games? That hasn’t been beaten since 1991? That has been declared the best high school football team in the country in five of the last six years?

Can’t come up with one?

How about – indescribable?

Rob Meadow remembers being awestruck when he saw De La Salle on TV back in 1997 and the Spartans were working on only their sixth consecutive perfect season.

At the time, Meadow – who had moved to California from Connecticut the year before – was a freshman at Los Gatos High School and apparently not having a very good time of it. “I wasn’t doing that well academically,” he said.

Now here was this high school football team not too far from his home that was beating all comers. Not just beating them, whupping ‘em.

“I remember looking at my dad and saying, ‘I want to go there,’” Meadow recalled. “My parents kind of got the ball rolling and I went there for an interview and they accepted me.”

Meadow didn’t start but eight games during his last two seasons at De La Salle – he suffered a season-ending knee injury during the fourth game of his senior year – but he impressed recruiters and received a number of offers, including one from the University of Washington, where he is now a redshirt junior and competing for a starting job at offensive tackle.

“Coach has given me and Ryan Brooks the title of co-number one,” the 6-foot-6, 300-pound Meadow said before practice the other day. “I don’t know what that means entirely, but I think we’ll be more situated after our next scrimmage on Saturday.”

What it means, in the eyes of line coach Charlie Dickey, is that Meadow “wants to be a good football player and he’s doing a nice job out there.”

You wouldn’t expect anything less from a kid who played for the team with the longest winning streak ever in football. And the Spartans will be out to extend it to 152 in their season opener on Sept. 4 at Qwest Field, taking on defending Class 3A champion Bellevue High.

I never played on a high school football team that won more than four games in a season or two games in a row but I still thought we were pretty hot stuff – we went 4-2-3 my senior year – so I have a hard time imagining what it’s like to play on a team that hasn’t lost a game in 12 years.

“It’s one of those things that you don’t realize what you’re doing until you’re out of the system,” Meadow said. “The coaches do such a good job of keeping you focused and present on what’s going on and you kind of live week-to-week.”

You would think the pressure to win, to keep this thing going, would be extreme. “You don’t go out there every week and go, ‘Oh, my God, we can’t lose this streak,’” Meadow said. “Coach instilled such a positive attitude of what you can do. It’s almost like losing isn’t even in your head. The more you’re out there playing, you’re not thinking about losing. You’re just picturing yourself winning.”

It’s like the Mariners. They picture themselves losing and then they go out and do it.

The strength of De La Salle teams over the years has been the offensive line. And it’s not that the Spartans field behemoth-like blockers. “Your average lineman there is 5-10, 6 feet, 215, 220 pounds, not especially big guys,” Meadow said. “No matter what, they’re always going to be able to rush the ball because the offensive linemen are so disciplined in their footwork and in their assignments and know what they’re doing.”

During the season, players watch film during their lunch breaks. And not just film of opponents, but film of themselves. “It’s hard work, discipline and attention to detail,” he said.

The coach isn’t bad, either. His name is Bob Ladouceur, and his record over the last 25 years is 287-14-1. And he does what he does because he believes he can “help shape lives, and he can’t think of a more noble vocation,” according to Neil Hayes, a sports columnist for the Contra Costa Times and the author of an excellent book on De La Salle football, “When the Game Stands Tall.”

If Meadow’s feelings reflect those of other De La Salle players, then the coach is a revered figure.

“Sometimes when you’re out there and you miss an assignment and you’re back in the huddle, you’re like, ‘Man, he’s going to rip me on my film tomorrow,’” Meadow said. “That’s all you can think about is letting him down and knowing that he’s going to be disappointed in you. You just want to go out and make him happy on every play because you respect him so much.”

I look forward to seeing the De La Salle Spartans go for No.152.

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