Friday, Oct. 21, 2005 | 7:33 a.m.
A heavy-metal song blares from a loudspeaker as the football team marches toward the field. The players stomp down a path, skinny teenagers made larger by their shoulder pads and glittering golden helmets.
"Ladies and gentlemen, your Golden Eagles, No. 2-ranked in the state!" the announcer shouts. Reaching the turf, the players erupt into jubilant clapping and jumping, bumping their chests against each other.
If the scene is a familiar one in high school football, the team is anything but routine.
The players are not popular high school jocks, but criminals convicted of stealing cars or armed robbery and sentenced to the Spring Mountain Youth Camp for a last chance to straighten out. Their coaches are probation officers.
This is not a regular high school football field, either. Look through one goalpost and you see, in the distance, jagged peaks and mesas fuzzy with pines. The other goal looks out on a steep, rocky slope mottled with brush. Over midfield, the ground drops away to a view of uninterrupted sky.
While the players are high school dropouts, juvenile delinquents, young thugs, as they walk onto the obscure field flanked by mountains, they are transformed from prisoners to athletes. Their mistakes, their disadvantages, their attitudes drop away, irrelevant. What matters now is football.
Eight-man football Spring Mountain Youth Camp, a Mount Charleston juvenile correctional facility where 100 boys at a time are incarcerated, has had a football team for more than 30 years. The team competes at the Class 1A level, playing eight-man football against the smallest high schools in Nevada, such as those in Beatty, Tonopah and Indian Springs.
On this day, Oct. 15, they are playing Lund High School. The team is from a ranching community with a population of around 150 about five hours away in White Pine County.
Spring Mountain football is having a very good year. Going into this game, the team was 5-1 with a shot at the playoffs. That means the Golden Eagles have a chance to win the first state championship in the school's history.
And for the first time this season, they are playing at home.
Thanks to an anonymous donation to the county, the team has a brand-new, half-million-dollar artificial turf field.
Class 1A games are played on an 80-yard field that also is slightly narrower than a standard football field. In past years, the team played its home games at Indian Springs High School, a 45-minute drive down the mountain.
Getting to Indian Springs for practice was time-consuming and expensive, but if the team didn't make the trip, it was left to scrimmage on rocks and dirt. Grass won't grow in the high-altitude cold of the camp, which is at an elevation of 8,470 feet.
The $447,190 for the new field came through the Children's Service Guild, a nonprofit organization that raises money to supplement the county's children's services. Guild President Sharon Friend said the donor or donors asked to remain unnamed.
The guild was "ecstatic" to get the funds, Friend said. "Now we're trying to get donations for a concession area and restrooms," she said.
Having its own field has given the team an enormous sense of confidence, said Clark County Coroner Michael Murphy, who is also the acting head of the county's Juvenile Justice Department. The county is searching for a new juvenile justice director and expects to hire one by the end of the year.
"We would never have had the opportunity to build this field if not for the benevolence of this donor," Murphy said. "This is not taxpayer dollars -- we use that for vital infrastructure needs. But this gift sends a message to the staff and kids" at the youth camp.
Murphy has become the team's booster-in-chief, attending nearly all of its games and encouraging department staff downtown to wear the team's colors, black and gold, and purchase team buttons.
Going into Saturday's game, the team had three games left. Win two, and they would go to the postseason. Beating Lund would take them a long way toward their goal.
The boys sentenced to Spring Mountain are felons, but not hardened criminals -- those go to the state correctional facility in Elko. Judges send to Spring Mountain those boys they think might be able to turn their lives around if taken out of their environment and exposed to the mountain air, stern but respectful treatment, intensive counseling, academics and activities such as sports.
Officials say the sports program -- in addition to football, the youths compete in basketball, baseball, track and wrestling -- teaches discipline, sportsmanship, maturity, teamwork, fair play: good skills for keeping out of trouble.
"It gives them the experience of success," Murphy said. For kids from bad neighborhoods and broken families, a touchdown at Spring Mountain may be the first time in their lives they have seen hard work pay off.
Cowboys vs. gangsters It's easy to see the contrast between the Lund Mustangs and the Spring Mountain Golden Eagles: cowboys against gangsters.
Both teams have the lanky physiques of teenage boys trying to bulk up in the middle of a growth spurt. But only the Spring Mountain boys have tattoos; only the Spring Mountain boys speak in a dialect that is unmistakably street.
Behind one end zone, about 50 of their fellow inmates sit in a line of folding chairs to watch. They wear the camp's uniform of blue jeans and hooded sweatshirts. A couple of them hold babies in their laps -- robotic babies that sound an alarm if not properly cared for. The babies are from a parenting class.
Many of the team members had never played football before, said camp manager David DeMarco, who has spent most of his career at Spring Mountain and coached the team from 1978 to 1982.
"Most of the kids here don't even go to school long enough to get into athletics," DeMarco said. "We have to teach them everything, from how to get down into a stance to how to tackle."
That was the case for Diego, a stocky 17-year-old with a round face. "This is my first time ever playing football," he said. Now he is one of the team's four senior captains, an honor that goes to the boys who show the most skill in football and leadership.
Quarterback Wesley, another captain, was good enough at football to play on his high school's team for half a season. "Then I just stopped going to school," he said ruefully.
All the players decline to talk about what they did to get sent to the youth camp, saying only that they fell in with the wrong people.
Being on the Spring Mountain team, Wesley says, "changed my whole attitude. It's opened my eyes. I'm about to be 18 -- I've got to change my life."
The boys' head coach is Marco Rafalovich, a tanned Pahrump native who played high school and college football. "A lot of these guys were just thugs before we got them on the team," he said.
But on the field, Rafalovich said, "It's real easy to forget that these guys have the history they have. We don't treat them like adjudicated delinquents. We treat them like a high school football team."
And they respond by acting like a team. Murphy tells a story that epitomizes how far the delinquents have come: In one of the team's games, a Golden Eagle lay on the ground after being tackled. An opposing player began kicking the downed player in the side, viciously. What was noteworthy about the incident, he said, was that the Golden Eagle in question, faced with overt, violent provocation, didn't take the bait. He simply got up and walked away.
Murphy wouldn't name the opposing team, not wanting to embarrass a competitor.
The Eagles eventually won the game, but that, Murphy said, wasn't the important thing. The important thing was that they'd learned "not to let someone get inside their head, not to react adversely to a situation."
As the game against Lund begins, the Eagles pull ahead early with a touchdown and two-point conversion. (In eight-man football, extra-point kicks are almost unheard of, since few teams have kickers.)
A few minutes later, a boy named Jerome positions himself to catch a pass at the 25-yard line. It falls into his hands, but he slips and stumbles, and the ball squirts away.
Jerome doesn't sulk or yell or even make a face. He shrugs it off and runs back up the field, clapping his hands, ready to move on.
A wide receiver named James says moments like these prove a point.
"We're not what they think we are," James says. "We're athletes. What we used to be doesn't matter."
Few fans on hand There are few fans in the stands at Spring Mountain. The games are not open to the public, and few of the players' families make the trip.
Sidney and Annette are an exception. They've come up from North Las Vegas to cheer for their son Carday. Annette boasts that she is a one-woman cheering section, belting, "Knock 'em out! Good hit!"
Carday was sent to the mountain in August after getting caught with a gun for the second time. "He's not a bad kid," Sidney said. "He just likes to be around the wrong people."
Sidney believes Carday's stay at Spring Mountain and his success at football will empower him to break free of his bad crowd.
"I think he learned this time," Sidney said. "I talked to him on the phone the other day, he's telling me he wants to get his life together and graduate from high school."
Conversation stops for a moment as the Golden Eagles snatch the ball on the Mustangs' 4-yard line. A boy named Dante who just joined the roster streaks down the field. Unbelievably, he runs all the way to the end zone, 76 yards away, for a touchdown.
Murphy, in the stands, is beside himself.
At halftime, the Golden Eagles lead 22-2, with Lund's only points coming on a freak safety.
Many fans in the stands are camp staffers. Frank Cooper, the principal of the camp's school, watches with visible pride. He has seen how football can give the students true pride and self-control where once there was only tough-guy bluster.
"This means a lot to them," Cooper said. "It's the first time they've been put in a situation where they have to work with other people."
The team is different every year, depending on who gets sent to the camp. This year, the chemistry seems to be right. In the fourth quarter, the Eagles are beating Lund 38-2.
A chance to star In eight-man football, with the smaller field and fewer players, there are a lot of incomplete passes, but also a lot of individual heroics -- such as the 76-yard touchdown run.
For Lund, one player seems to be doing all the work, a tall boy in yellow shoes named Logan. As the fourth quarter ticks away, he makes a 23-yard reception for a touchdown, making the score 38-8 when the conversion fails.
The Eagles decide to top that, as a quarterback, Andrew, throws a 37-yard pass caught in the end zone: 46-8.
With five seconds to go, with the game's outcome long since beyond doubt, an Eagles running back named Demontai takes it in for a final touchdown.
"That's the ballgame, folks," the announcer shouts. Final score: 52-14.
The two teams line up and approach each other from opposite sides of the field in the post-game ritual of sportsmanship, holding their arms out at waist level and slapping hands.
The victory means it will take just one more win for Spring Mountain to advance to the playoffs. The team plays Saturday at Tonopah and next week at Indian Springs.
"We're going to take it all the way, I hope," says blond, square-jawed quarterback Andrew. "We're making history. I'm looking all the way to state."
Win or lose, however, these boys know that their time at Spring Mountain marks a turning point in their lives. They know that somebody, somewhere, believed in them enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to give them a place to play.
Diego, the boy who made captain after learning football for the first time at the camp, sums it up. "When we're here," he says, "we're not losing."
Molly Ball can be reached at 259-8814 or [email protected]
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