WETHERSFIELD – Once the Wethersfield football team lost its third game and its junior quarterback to an injury last year, the Eagles knew they didn’t have a chance to make the playoffs.
“After that point, I feel like everybody just started giving up and didn’t play as hard as we could have been,” Wethersfield senior safety Danny Smith said. “If we did push each other, how we do now, we probably could’ve ended up winning a game instead of going 0-10.”
How Wethersfield went from 0-10 to 9-1 (almost 10-0 but for a controversial call in the overtime loss to Bristol Central) is a testament to a group of seniors who refused to give up. They knew they were good. They knew what a winning culture was like.
Even with their record, the Eagles had to win to get into the playoffs and they did, beating Newington in overtime 20-14 last Wednesday and now the two CCC Tier III teams will face each other again Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. in the Class MM quarterfinal game at Newington High.
Newington, whose only loss came to Wethersfield, is the No. 4 seed; Wethersfield is the No. 5 seed.
“We knew we had a good group of guys coming out of the 0-10 season in my grade,” said senior quarterback Cam Righi, who will go to UConn next year to play baseball. “We’d been playing together a long time, there’s a lot of us and we know we love football and we all really want to win.
“Going into the offseason together, we all decided we need to flip the switch, kind of turn this team around. We really wanted to focus on creating a new culture for our team.”
It started last December in the weight room. Led by the captains – Righi, Smith and linebackers Erik Bellovodo and Brayden Bernard – they believed they could turn things around.
The year before, Wethersfield went 8-3, losing in the Class MM quarterfinals to Killingly. But the Eagles graduated a lot of players from that team. That, coupled with a more difficult schedule, produced what coach Matt McKinnon called “a perfect storm.”
Losing Righi to a torn labrum against Shelton in Week 3 didn’t help, either. McKinnon did not have a true backup quarterback, so other skill players rotated in and out of the position.
“We were young and not ready for varsity football yet as a team overall,” McKinnon said. “Then we got into the offseason. We started lifting right away in December and started working hard. The guys fully bought in.
“The senior leadership has been awesome, and we used last year as fuel for us for the past 11 months up to this point.”
In the first game, a 49-6 win over Hartford Public, the players could sense a change.
“Everyone was smiling,” Bernard said. “It was great.”
And then the Eagles kept winning. Until they went up against Bristol Central – the second seed in Class MM – on Oct. 4.
McKinnon said at the end of the game, there was a fumble by Bristol Central and a Newington player scooped up the ball and scored with 20 seconds left. As they were lining up for the extra point, he said an official ruled that the play was a forward pass and the touchdown didn’t count. The game went into overtime and Wethersfield lost 42-40.
As the No. 8 ranked team in Class MM, with only eight teams making it to the playoffs, Wethersfield couldn’t afford to lose again. They didn’t.
When the game went into overtime against Newington last Wednesday, the Wethersfield players remembered what that felt like. If the Eagles lost, their season was over. “The mindset was we’re not losing again in overtime,” Bellovodo said.
“This year’s been amazing,” he added. “You couldn’t ask for a better turnaround, really – 9-1 and playing for a state title again. It’s a great feeling.”