The Revere High School (RHS) Varsity Football team started the 2024 season with three straight wins for the first time since 2018.
The Minutemen defeated Woodridge, Garfield and Ravenna in the first three games of their season. The team had not begun a season 3-0 since 2018.
To Head Coach Robert Nickol, a challenge faced previously in the football program was athleticism. Nickol said that athleticism has to be overridden by preparation in practice and mistakes must be avoided to enable success.
“We’re going to have to bank on our strength [and] on our intelligence. We’re not going to be the most athletic team in the league. I tell them each and every week, it just is what it is. So we really have to make sure we do all the little things correctly. [We] can’t make a lot of mental mistakes, physical mistakes, and, with the exception of this past week, we’ve been pretty good on [preventing] penalties,” Nickol said
Senior running back and Captain Rowan Klein said the team is headed towards a highly improved season.
“The school is looking at the best season that Revere Football has had in a long time,” Klein said.
Klein said that the captains help keep the team’s spirit up during games by encouraging involvement from the sidelines. This way, the sidelines are involved in the excitement and motivation.
“You just have to keep the sidelines active to go around and talk to people, tell them how they’re doing, . . . but one of the things we do is . . . just call out what you see happening on the field so that the sidelines are part of the game too even if they’re not playing. A really big part of that would be motivating the teammates, talking to them, letting them know that you guys are all in the same boat,” Klein said.
Assistant Coach and Special Teams Coordinator William D’Amico also said he expects the Minutemen to continue their successful season by overcoming challenges faced and collecting wins.
“I expect our boys to keep playing through the adversity and whatnot throughout the season, stack up some more wins and see where that takes us in the postseason,” D’Amico said.
D’Amico said the football season is a challenge that the team has to work to overcome.
“I think every week is a challenge in high school football. The ball cannot bounce your way, you might get some penalties, you might drop the ball and stuff like that. And I think you have to bring it every Friday,” D’Amico said.
Nickol also said that Revere has to continue to mend together different personalities to enhance team spirit. In previous years, Revere’s roster had a limited number of players performing in the Revere football program.
“Now we’ve got almost fifty [players] so when you have a bigger locker room, you got a lot of different personalities, but they’ve co-existed really well together. And we’ve been banking on the juniors and seniors to kind of bring along the sophomores and help them out . . . so it’s a tight-knit group,” Nickol said.
The RHS football team has had a winning start, and the coaches and players look to continue that and overcome any challenges that stand in their way.
