The Tale of Dobbs Ferry Football: Part One

There are countless happenings in the sports world that I could write about in this blog. The mets record breaking collapse, the Rockies in the NLCS, another NFL pothead running back. The list goes on and on. Any of these issues with professional athletes might have been a good topic to go into, but I decided to dedicate this blog to a story that is close to my heart. A tradition that I went through. A school that I played for, in a town that loves friday nights under the lights. It is a story that wont be on sportscenter tonight. Its the tale of a football dynasty that most people will never hear about.

The Dobbs Ferry High School football team has seen its share of ups and downs over the last few decades. In the 1980s, they were a powerhouse. Known as "the team of the decade", in a time before the state championship game, they were voted state champions four straight years by the New York State Sportswriters Association. From 1980-1989, Dobbs Ferry High School only lost eight games, and in that decade, there was a span in which they won over 50 straight games. Only about a decade early, from 1969-1973, Dobbs Ferry HS did not win a single game, and tallied a record of 0-40-2. The 1990s were a transitional period for the Dobbs Ferry HS football team, as they were forced to merge with the Hastings HS team. Hastings and Dobbs Ferry's are each others rivals, so you could see how these were not the best of times for either schools football squad. The merger lasted from 1993 to 1998, until a man named Jamie Block started a campaign to "wake the echoes" of Dobbs Ferry football. Coach Block, now the athletic director for Valhalla HS, another Westchester school, is very loved in the town of Dobbs Ferry. He was a phys ed teacher at the local elementary school, but Coach had a passion for football, and he knew that Dobbs Ferry needed to have its own team back up and running, dominating the county like it should be. He got legendary coach Frank "Skip" Violante, to return to Dobbs in 2000, after leaving when the team merged with Hastings to coach his sons at another Westchester HS named Somers High. Skip was the coach of the 70s, the 80s, and early in the 90s, and was known for his hard nose coaching. He was a very intense guy, and the faint hearted players usually would not survive on his roster for very long.

In 2000, the year before my class entered High School, Dobbs Ferry did not return to its form that most people thought it would. With a group of promising, but unexperienced young players, the Screaming Eagles went 2-6, and had the coaches and people of the town thinking that maybe trying to "wake the echoes" of Dobbs Ferry football wasn't such a good idea after all.