by Elizabeth Farina
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Football season is fast approaching as scrimmages begin to take place during the summer-ending days of August. Building teams through hard work and trust, each player brings their skills and dedication to the field, as well as a future hope that a winning season will happen for them and their coaches. Team managers wait on the sidelines with certified athletic trainers to assist the athletes. Parents, the core of the team’s booster club, paint the goal posts before the first game. Today is a different era from where it all began in the Village of Midlothian.

For one local high school team, the tradition began 53 years ago. Memories of another era gathered last weekend at the Midlothian Fabulous Fifties (and Sixties!) Reunion. Seven classes, from 1955 to 1966, celebrated their lifelong friends during a two-day event in Bon Air and at Salisbury Country Club. The Midlothian School, which served k-12 at the location of the modern-day middle school, was the site for the 1956 Trojans homecoming victory against Amelia County on a gravel field. It would be the first win for the first-year team.

The first year coach, the late Mike Phillips, said to the Richmond News Leader in September 1956 that he “expects Midlothian to win a couple of games.” The coach was right in his prediction.

Bill Hoerter, known as “Billy” to his fellow classmates from the Class of 1958, was a right end for Midlothian’s first season. Most of the team had never played organized football.  “There were so few of us, we had to play the whole 60 minutes, offense and defense. But it was a heck of a lot of fun and we won two games,” Hoerter said.

Geoffrey “Jeff” Applegate, the team’s first quarterback who also served in his later years on the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors, remembers the win because he was moved by the fact they achieved something to support Coach Phillips. “That’s the first time we were able to play in Midlothian. We had no lights,” he said.

Applegate remembers Billy Hoerter, in one of the last plays of the game, ran for the touchdown. “That boy [Bill], ran 86 yards, and he won’t tell you, untouched for the touchdown,” he said.

It was the exact opposite feeling from the first game of the season. “We had to play our home games at Thomas Dale. The first game was against Prince George and we were a little bit nervous,” he said.

The team lost the first game 25-7, but still celebrated the first touchdown with incredible hoopla, the paper reported. “We just had a great bunch of people,” Applegate said.

The celebration was warranted. The players had been literally fund raising for over two years before the first touchdown of the first game. “We had a wonderful coach and some volunteer help. The biggest thing for me was the fact that we had to sell magazines in order to earn money to buy uniforms to have football,” Applegate said. “The county was unable to provide us with the funds to have uniforms, so we sold a lot of magazines over a period of two years.”

Applegate remembers it was about the work ethic. “If it’s anything we learned when we went out onto the field in Midlothian, which was no grass and all gravel, and you go [practice] at 6 a.m., and you come back, and you’re skinned up and have no locker room for a shower and you hang up your practice uniforms on a nail – the answer is work ethic,” he said.

And work ethic led to Midlothian Trojans to a District II Championship during the 1960 season with the Midlothian team delivering eight wins and two losses, a complete opposite from the first team’s record.  Coach Lou Wacker was leading the team that year. “I didn’t [win it], but I had a group of players that did,” he said.

Wacker, who graduated from the University of Richmond, went into his first coaching job at the local school. He was an assistant coach at Hampden-Sydney College for 20 years and helped build a winning program as the head football coach at Emory & Henry College during the next 23 years.  “That’s a lot of years,” he said.

However, even through the years, he remembers that first coaching job. “As always, in coaching, if you got good athletes and kids, they motivate themselves. They were just hard workers. I had a bunch of great kids, but as I look around, they don’t look like kids anymore,” he said. “The players worked hard at it. The addition, what is now the junior high school, was where we started. We built the field behind, what was then, the high school,” he said.

Robert “Bob” Schweickert, who was the Trojans’ quarterback, remembers playing on the field next to the school. “At Midlothian, initially we played on just a dirt field with no stands. People had to just stand around the football field,” he said.

This alumnus, who would be part of Virginia Tech’s 1963 Southern Conference Championship team, was drafted after college graduation by the New York Jets during the Joe Namath era. He also recalled his first year of football, when he really didn’t have the proper shoes. “I wore wing-tipped shoes and I never could understand why they wouldn’t hold up very well. But we played on the football field in Midlothian that was rocks, mostly dirt and some grass,” he said.

Schweickert would “borrow” someone else’s shoes to play junior varsity games at Midlothian. “When I came on the varsity team in ninth grade I did have a pair of football shoes. It’s interesting when you’re playing on a football team and you don’t have a pair of football shoes,” he said.

For the athlete, playing with a smaller-sized team was magic. “One of the advantages of that is that it allows you to play all the time. So, I got to play defense – I was our kicker, I was our punter, I did the extra points and I was our quarterback so I played 60 minutes. And if you love a sport, you want to play all the time,” he said.

Coach Wacker kept the team in shape, Schweickert said. “At the end of the game, we were in excellent shape,” he said. “One of the things I enjoyed playing in football was [being] quarterback. I enjoyed outfoxing the defense.”

“I wouldn’t trade any of it,” Schweickert said. “The joy of playing with a small team of wonderful guys who give everything they have; today, there is so much talent. We had to make up for talent with desire.”