Indiana Facing Not Unfamiliar Foe
Matthew Pickut
Thursday April 1, 2004
That was the kind of night it was—a come back victory, a game winning kick, and the Firebirds clawing back to 3-5 from 0-5. Love was in the air and, as the church newsletter often says, “a good time was had by all.”
As much as a field goal attempt might be an oddly romantic event—and buddy if you’re out there, you got yourself a keeper—it was nothing compared to the love that I saw when I asked Firebirds head coach Mike Wilpolt about facing former Firebird, and now Colorado Crush head coach, Mike Dailey.
“It will be interesting, I’ll have a lot of different emotions,” said Wilpolt. “He was my teacher basically for Arena Football and being a coach. I’ll be excited going against him and his assistant coaches. We’ve been teammates and now we’re on opposite sides. They’re going to have a good idea of what we’re doing and we’re going to have a good idea what they’re doing so its going to come down to who makes the fewest mistakes.”
Wilpolt knows that his team needs to win in spite of his obvious admiration for Dailey and expect emotions to be high for the players who remain from the Dailey era.
“We’ll treat it like any other game,” said Wilpolt. “This is step four for us—they’ll be a little extra geeked up probably facing the guy who brought them into the league. For most of these guys coach Dailey is the man that brought them, but they’re veterans, so I think they’ll stay calm.”
As for the players, their friendships with Coach Dailey and many of the Crush players who played last year in Indiana will not stop them from playing hard.
“It’s another game, you can’t look at it as anything else,” said wide receiver/defensive back Evan Hlavacek. “I don’t resent him or anything like that. He’s always been a great coach and a good friend to me.”
“We’re not worried about them,” said lineman Ricky Hall. “We’re worried about we do. We have to take it one game at a time and they’re next on the schedule. They’re still friends. I still talk to them.”
“It was a really big win, because no matter how much you talk about it, it’s still hard to get up for a team that’s 0-6,” said Hall’s linemate, Chris Snyder. “It might be [tough to play against familiar faces] but I don’t expect it to be. I don’t go out there and treat other people like they’re my enemy. I play as hard against guys who are my friends as I do against guys I don’t even know. It business, it`s not personal.”
Fullback/linebacker Leroy Thompson looks forward to games like this week’s contest against familiar foes, because they offer a chance to let the players on the field determine the winner.
“Personally I love those games,” said Thompson. “They are always physical. Like when we played Chicago, they know our tendencies, we know they’re tendencies. It’s always a tough game. It’s going to be intense. It’s going to be a physical game. We’re going to eat with them before the game and then try and take it to them Saturday night.”
“Its going to be a special game,” said wide receiver/defensive back Brett Bech, summing up the feeling in the locker room looking ahead to Saturday’s game. “We definitely want to win it.”
Matthew Pickut is a pastor in northern Indiana and a long time AFL fan. He also writes for his own website: The Brown Paper Blog. He graduated from Taylor University in Upland Indiana (class of `96) with degrees in Biblical Literature and Sociology as well as a healthy respect for the medicinal properties of coffee.
