Continuing Coverage by:

All Eyes On Tech

August 30, 2007

By Darryl Slater

BLACKSBURG, Va. — Saturdays are family time at Andy Lowry's house. After a week of scouting and game-planning and stalking the sideline at Columbine High, the football coach is usually too weary to watch more football.

Saturdays this fall will be different. Lowry will plop down on the couch and flip through the channels until he finds the college game he's looking for.

"I'll be paying a lot more attention to Virginia Tech," he said.

Inside his suburban Denver home, some 1,500 miles from Blacksburg, Lowry will see a team try to lift a school and town, if only for a few hours. It will remind him of eight years ago at Columbine, of the blood and bullets, the anger and tears, the little things that heal us and how the biggest wounds never heal.

He will see a team saddled with great expectations: Bring fans together, make them smile, help them block out April 16, when Tech student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 25 others on campus.

Lowry will see a team filled with great potential, ranked ninth in the preseason polls, with one of the nation's best defenses. But among the players Lowry will watch, perhaps the most is expected of junior quarterback Sean Glennon.

Questions about him simmered among fans during the winter, after the Hokies blew a 21-3 halftime lead in the Chick-fil-A Bowl and lost 31-24 to Georgia. Is Glennon mobile enough? Steady enough? Ready to be the starter at all?

He knows he is expected to take charge more than ever, to excel before millions of anxious eyes, to shoulder unprecedented pressure. He welcomes it all, the chance to forget his past struggles while easing his school's enduring pain. No one is expecting him to play Messiah, not for his team, certainly not for April 16. Everyone just wants to see what he wants to show — that he's still standing, like his school, like Blacksburg.

"As a football team, probably there's never been more people in the country paying attention to what Virginia Tech does," 21st-year Tech coach Frank Beamer said.

Together as one

Drive into downtown Blacksburg on North Main Street, and the first things you see are the 32 flags flying in front of Blacksburg Baptist Church. They represent each victim's home country.

Steer down Main, and the banner in front of Cook's Clean Center screams: WE ARE HOKIES. WE WILL PREVAIL! Similar signs hang in almost every business on Main.

Reminders of April 16 are everywhere around town — from the old lady wearing the maroon "Hokies United" T-shirt created after the shootings, to the magnetic remembrance ribbons affixed to almost every car. If ever a separation existed between Blacksburg (population: 39,000) and Virginia Tech, it is gone now.

That sense of collectivism surrounds the football program. Around the Merryman Center, its epicenter, Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer greets folks in the halls with a "How we doin'?" In the middle of the practice field, a sign hanging from an observation tower bears the same slogan as the Hokies' team T-shirts: "None of us is as good as ALL of us."

Chance at redemption

Unity? Couldn't find it during the offseason if you polled Tech's fans on the quarterback situation. In the bowl game, Georgia scored 28 straight points in less than 14 minutes of the second half, as Glennon, a first-year starter, threw three interceptions and lost a fumble.

After the game, he got in a car and rode home with teammates Eddie Royal and Justin Born, his close friends from Westfield High in Chantilly. Royal foresaw the criticism Glennon would face.

"Just keep your head up," Royal told him. "A lot of people are going to be putting you down. We know that you're better than you played."

Royal and Born repeated the encouragement for hours. Glennon, for the most part, sat silent.

"It kind of seemed like it went in one ear and out the other," Royal said. "He was just where you couldn't talk to him."

When Glennon returned to campus for the spring semester, quarterbacks coach Mike O'Cain sat down with him, reviewed film of the bowl and warned him about fans' criticism.

"Quit listening to it," O'Cain told him. "They can't help you get better."

Glennon said the negativity affected him for a week. Then he returned to spring practice intent on changing his coaches' uncertainty about his position. Teammates noticed him staying after practice alone, throwing into a net and tinkering with his footwork.

"Last year, we never put the stamp on Sean as being 'our quarterback,' the No. 1 guy — period," O'Cain said. "It was always the No.1 guy with a comma behind it. When he stepped up there this spring, he stepped up there with a period behind it. It was Sean's job."

Said Glennon: "I love to be the guy that people aren't sure about and come out and play well. I really am confident that I'm a better quarterback than I showed. If people want to doubt me, I'm not going to let that bother me."

After the bowl game, he set his mind on the beginning of spring practice, anticipating the moment when he could again prove his worth. Now, Saturday's season opener against East Carolina is bouncing inside his head — that first snap; the beginning of the pressure that will build every week, win or lose; the chance to show something to everyone who says that he not only might play better, but that he must play better.

"That's why I came here, and that's why I love playing quarterback," he said. "That's what it's all about."

So everyone will focus expectant eyes on him again, wonder if he can dodge defensive ends any better, pray his stats are better than the 11 touchdowns and 11 interceptions he threw last season.

"Can Sean win a football game for us?" O'Cain said. "Yeah, and I think he has the capabilities to win a football game for us. Never have we asked him to do that."

An ‘average man’ school

Where does it all come from, these weighty expectations, this obsession with a team, with a 21-year-old quarterback's mechanics?

Start big, with America's fervor for its sports teams, its need to grasp a collective identity and purpose, especially after tragedies — the New York Yankees after 9/11, the New Orleans Saints after Hurricane Katrina.

Move smaller, further into the past, with Tech's 1964 decision to drop its requirement that male students receive two years of military training with the Corps of Cadets. Regular folks poured into Tech, increasing enrollment and alumni.

"A lot of kids over the years, they were the first one in their family to get a college education," said Bill Foster, a football booster who grew up in Roanoke, graduated Tech in 1965 and served on the board of visitors from 1976 to 1984. "That means a lot to people for their kids to have something that they didn't have. Tech is a school for the average man. It's not elitist. You get in easily, but you've got to stay in on your own merit."

People in southwestern Virginia's farming communities could relate. The good Lord put you here, but you earned what you got with your sweat and hands, even when America left its small towns behind in the hustle of the 1980s.

Long the only game in town, Tech football suddenly was worth rooting for when Bill Dooley led the Hokies to three bowl games in the '80s. Beamer struggled in his first six years before taking the Hokies to new heights in the mid '90s. And a growing fan base, bolstered by the post-1964 enrollment boom, came along for the ride.

"I think this fan base really appreciates where their program is more than anybody else, because they were winning three or four games just 10 or 15 years ago," said Kirk Herbstreit, a college football analyst for ESPN since 1996.

Even in an Internet-crazed age, Tech seems to have not forgotten those it served first, the kids who came off the farms and returned home with diplomas. After every football game, the band's final tune is a classical song best known as the theme of ABC's "Wide World of Sports."

Its title: "Fanfare for the Common Man."

Healing power

You can ask a lot of a school and a football team — to provide the family's first college degree, to reinforce an area's blue-collar ethos with a defense that uses a beat-up metal lunch box as its talisman, to give you a quarterback's shortcomings to complain about.

Can you ask it to heal?

Lowry, the Columbine football coach, can answer better than almost anyone. On April 20, 1999, two students stormed into Columbine and killed 12 students and a teacher before shooting themselves dead. The next fall, Lowry's team won the school's first state championship, dedicating it to teammate Matt Kechter, who was killed April 20.

"I had that question asked before, and it's like, 'You know what — it's a football team,'" he said. "We lost 13 [people]. You're talking about a football game compared to a mass murder. It doesn't replace that, and it doesn't bring those people back. But it did bring back healing to the community. It had its course of hours, or it had its course of several months. It didn't take away the pain."

The shootings at Tech dredged up that pain inside Lowry. On the eighth anniversary of the Columbine massacre, he sat with about 10 other teachers in the faculty lounge and recounted that day and everything it left behind.

He remembered scrambling outside behind the football equipment shed, where a skinny sophomore named Mike Johnson lay bleeding, bullet holes in his quadriceps and ankle, his cheek torn from a bullet that ripped through the back of his neck.

He remembered running for help, telling Johnson he'd be right back, only for a cop to order him to hit the ground right there in the baseball outfield. He remembered laying down, feeling like a coward for leaving Johnson.

He remembered pulling the equipment from that shed months later, after making peace with himself when he talked to Johnson in the days after the shootings and learned the kid would recover.

He remembered everything that happened that fall: his anger at some media for blaming the jock culture for the shootings, his exhaustion every week of the season, as he waded through game plans while hoping his players didn't emotionally melt.

After the state championship game, his team shouted and celebrated in the locker room. Kechter's family came in, and the cheering continued.

"Finally, it just turned into everybody sobbing," Lowry said.

They were left where they started April 20, with tears streaming down their cheeks, and yet somehow, they had progressed. Eight years later, Lowry still aches, the picture of Kechter still hangs in his office. He looks back on the championship season and doesn't know if he can ever expect it to cure his sadness.

He doesn't know if, on a bigger stage, anyone can expect the Hokies to do anything more than stand together on a Saturday afternoon and let everyone watch.

"It's going to be one of those times," he said, "where it's time to go back and recapture your school and show the rest of the world how special of a place it is."

Contact Darryl Slater at (804) 649-6026 or dslater@timesdispatch.com.