Pieces Of Glass

Yale-bound lineman Sterling Strother reflects on his time with Campolindo football

By STERLING STROTHER, Campolindo Football ’16

“That’s what I love about football; you really just got to have every right little piece, every color, of the kaleidoscope.”

I’m sitting at a restaurant in Walnut Creek with two of my best friends from the Campolindo High football team, Jonathan Hughes and Logan MacDonald, glancing at each of them with a small grin as Coach Kevin Macy rambles on about why football is the greatest sport known to mankind (which, of course, it is). Logan, Jonathan, myself, and anybody affiliated with Campolindo football has undoubtedly been subjected to many an impromptu speech by Coach Macy.

While these speeches are occasionally a little bit repetitive, they’re never boring, and everyone in Moraga can tell you that being in the audience for a tirade of Macyisms will always leave you with a new perspective on the sport, our team, our league, our section or the government. Today I came away from dinner knowing that Campolindo football succeeds because of its similarity to a toy with pretty colors and patterns.

Anyone who is familiar with Campolindo football knows, to be frank, that we win games we have no business winning. Our offensive and defensive lines are generally small in stature and numbers, our receivers relatively average in speed and leaping ability, our quarterbacks with funky arm slots. If someone were to look at the players on our team individually, they would see the individual pieces of glass that are placed in a kaleidoscope: unremarkable, nothing special.

Standing alone, a tiny piece of glass is pretty worthless, its potential untapped. But, all kaleidoscopes are made by someone who can find potential for beauty in the seemingly irrelevant shards of glass, someone with enough attention to detail and patience to slowly fit each individual piece of glass into place. These people are Kevin Macy, Bill Levey, Matt Macy, Chris Schofield, Matt Keeperman, Mike Ahr, and the rest of the coaches in the Campo program. Fitting these pieces together is a tedious job, and one impure, blemished piece of glass can destroy everything the assemblers have intended to create. Coach Macy’s knowledge of this possibility, and his team-building strategies, have allowed him to create extremely tight, trusting teams that have proven that individuals who appear mediocre can band together and exceed expectations year in and year out.

I truly believe the staff at Campolindo can gameplan and adjust as well as any coaching staff in the state. Once a kaleidoscope is assembled with all of the pieces of glass and mirrors in place, the manipulator of the toy must rotate the two disks at the end of the toy until a satisfactory pattern is reached.

Each and every week, without fail, the coaching staff adjusts the team kaleidoscope to form a perfect pattern, trusting that the alignment of their glass pieces will yield a beautiful result. As Coach Macy spends more time with each year’s kaleidoscope, his chemistry with the disks of glass he is manipulating grows stronger, which explains my belief that Campo plays our best ball at the end of the year, in the playoffs.

By the time this article is published, I will have graduated from Campo, but I will forever be grateful for my time as one of Coach Macy’s small pieces of glass.