CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) -Win or lose, Virginia’s players buy into what coach Al Groh tells them about being a family.
It’s never truer than the final week of the season.
On Thursday, the team shared a Thanksgiving dinner. On Friday, the night before the Cavaliers play No. 14 Virginia Tech in the final game of many of their careers, raw emotions will flow as one by one the seniors tell the team what it has meant to their lives.
“It’s actually fairly gut-wrenching to see your friends that you went through school with, you played ball with, you worked and struggled and bled with to get up there and to have the raw emotions that they have going into their last game,” fifth-year senior linebacker and co-captain Aaron Clark said. “Some people will never play football again.”
Watching, and listening, is meaningful to head coach Al Groh, who said he’s “more than curious or surprised, mostly gratified that they express their experience the way that they do.”
s year.
Besides being the final game for many of the players, Saturday also could well be Groh’s last. The Cavaliers (3-8, 2-5 Atlantic Coast Conference) have lost five straight games this season, and five straight against the Hokies (8-3, 5-2). Attendance at Scott Stadium also has declined dramatically – the average this year is down 13,600 compared to two years ago.
“We know how big of a win this would be, not only for us as players but for the coaches,” linebacker Denzell Burrell said. “We know that they’re putting their 100 percent effort and everything into this game and we really want to win it for them as much as for ourselves because we’re all one big family and we’ve all been hurting the same this year.”
In the past, many players have used the talk to try to fire their teammates up one last time, and some have had epiphanies. A few years ago, one lineman rose and stunned the room by sharing how he’d short-changed himself – and the team – with a lack of effort.
Senior Nate Collins, another captain, said he most remembers linebacker Clint Sintim sharing in a smaller setting – the house they shared with several other teammates.
Sintim is now in the NFL with the New York Giants, and while Collins, Clark and many of their teammates hope to also go on to the NFL, the good-byes are still difficult.
. “It’s just one of those things just to let your teammates know … just to come out and say I loved playing with you guys and it’s going to be hard that after this game, we’ll never get the chance again to put pads on and be in the locker room like we are and like we have been.”
As many as 30 seniors will get the chance to speak at the dinner, and for some of them, the discomfort of the getting up will hardly compare to their desire to share feelings.
“I’m pretty shy,” Vic Hall, another of the six captains, said. “I’m not long-winded with words, but whatever’s on my heart and on my mind, I’m going to speak it.”
The evening has become one the team looks forward to.
“It’s different when you have your coaches talk all the time, but when you have one of your brothers up there talking, it’s always good and it’s always something special for everyone,” Collins said. “It can be real effective because I feel like every year you just find out, you hear different perspectives and their stories, what they are playing for and how the team has helped them stay together and how they want to do everything they can.”
It is, Clark said, a nice way to wrap up a college career.
“It’s something special,” he said. “It’s something you will always remember.”
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