New season brings chance to succeed

“Seven days…….”
Anyone who follows the Jay County High School girls soccer Twitter account gets regular updates like the one above, which was posted Monday. It marked the one-week mark until the Patriots open their season.
For almost all Indiana teams — the girls golfers got their campaigns started last week — a new beginning is about a week away.
As with every season, a new year brings new hope. For some, it’s hope to repeat past successes. For others, it’s hope to erase past struggles with new levels of achievement.
Our local teams run that entire gamut, from the Fort Recovery High School football team and its goal of repeating as the Division VII state champion to those that have struggled just to win a few games, meets or matches in recent years.
What’s exciting about this time of the season is that there is real opportunity for a team to change its fortune. And no team illustrates that better than the Tribe gridders.
Think about the chatter that must have been going only last week when nearly 40 teams played in the team’s annual golf outing. The Indian faithful are thinking state title, again.
That’s a lot of pressure, but it’s also a realistic goal. And the fact that is now the reality for the program is proof that fortunes can change.
Fort Recovery’s football team toiled for more than two decades. From 2003 through 2006 it went a combined 4-36 — one win each season. As of just two years ago, the Indians had never even made the playoffs.
Now, they’re the team to beat.
It seemed to happen overnight, the Indians going from back-to-back 3-7 seasons in 2012 and ’13 to winning seven games and earning a playoff berth in 2014 to clobbering Mogadore for the state championship last season.
But success doesn’t happen overnight. Changes like this don’t start on the first day of the season, the first practice of two-a-days or even the beginning of summer workouts. They are a process that sometimes takes years — years of hard work, years of focus, years of dedication.
Though he’s never been a fan of preseason talk of how many wins his team might garner, there were times when coach Brent Niekamp’s team looked as if it might be ready to break through. It made a run at the playoffs in 2007, falling short as it finished 5-5. There was another opportunity in 2011, but tight losses to Parkway and Versailles left the Tribe at 4-6.
It was in that season, though, that the foundation was built.
“If we win those two games that year, we’re in (the playoffs),” Niekamp said last year, days before his team hoisted the Division VII trophy. “So I felt like that year was kind of a turning point of playing at just a little different level and just a little different expectation.”
It took a couple more years for that level of expectation to show the kind of results that have turned Fort Recovery into a village in love with high school football, but it happened. And that’s why this time of year is so fun.
Have you put in the hard work? Have you dedicated yourself to your sport? Are you and your teammates all striving toward the same goal?
If the answer is “yes” to those questions, this could be your year. It all starts next week.
Good luck.