Trinity Football, you will always hold a special place in my heart, right next to Visine eye drops and Smarties candies — generally nice things that I have no particular passion for, but that have brought me experiences ranging from average to good. I once had a panic attack filming one of your games, and during halftime of that same game, consumed my very first alcohol that was not GermX in middle school.
You are either a sweet, perfect church boy who will probably be the president of Dell in 10 years, or you think sitting on a tree while drunk counts as a personality, but the one thing you all share is an overabundance of shirts featuring long, confusing acronyms.
Fellow seniors, you have forever said goodbye to playing the beautiful, brutal sport you love, unless you decide to pull a Jay Foster and get some more of those sweet 6 a.m.’s.
Regardless, your senior season has truly been better than any other season you have experienced here.
Last year, you guys were remarkably decent. Almost every other game in the 6–4 run was won in overtime. Those tense games were almost as entertaining as trying to guess what the hell those “Trinity?” shirts were supposed to mean.
This year, you were better by exactly one game. You ended the season by defeating an undefeated team. This and other victories of the season are not the result of dedication and teamwork but of one single man.
“Tommy Lavine is the reason we win games,” said senior offensive tackle Brad Long.
Other factors may also play a role, but it is mostly junior wide receiver Tommy Lavine.
“99 percent of our victory is Tommy,” said senior offensive lineman Joel Holmes. “The other one percent is Matt Willis.”
In addition to carrying the entire team on his back, Lavine has also tied with little baby sophomore wide receiver Peyton Tuggle and aggressively friendly defensive back Jordan Williams for friendliest smile in a survey of only myself.
Jerheme Urban, former NFL player and current Trinity head coach — who is a better athlete than everyone on the team — wrote in an email about his pride regarding the season.
“I am really proud of the perseverance and the unity that this team showed,” Urban said. “They stuck together and constantly competed to the end of every game and never thought that they couldn’t win a game.”
Despite what you thought, there were exactly three games you could not win. The worst defeat saw Millsaps College finally get revenge for that decade old Mississippi Miracle in which Trinity won a football game by playing rugby, which is apparently legal. The Mississippi Miracle is the greatest thing your team has ever done, and that’s counting those “Trinity?” practice shirts. Seeing 50 of those confusing shirts every morning in Mabee was one of my most defining college experiences, right up there with coming out of the closet and making a mixtape with Joel Holmes.
Your last match with Millsaps was the opposite of a miracle, but let’s celebrate the real MVP of this 12 turnover game and title of a hypothetical country song: Kentucky Rain.
In conclusion, Trinity Football team, yes. Your games may be kind of annoying. TUPD emails me to move my car into a spot that does not exist so that one of the first-year benchwarmers’ girlfriend from high school-who he is planning to dump over this upcoming Thanksgiving Break-can park her car to watch the same highlight video play on a giant scoreboard on loop from 10 a.m. until the game begins at 6 p.m. the next day.
“I am very proud of these young men,” Urban said.
I am also proud. Not just for the games you won, but for the games you had no chance of winning but in which you never stopped trying to win. I am proud to call some of you classmates and some of you friends, though in reality you are really more acquaintances that I know from church or class or mixtape making. You played your heart out, but you also did something even greater, something no one else in all of Trinity has ever done before. You actually learned the words to the Trinity fight song.
