“To be the one to make that play or to be a part of that play is just super cool to see and just something that you know, in the social media era, you’ll have to show your kids and people you interact with for the rest of your life,” said Marshall, who also remembers hanging out with friends afterward and not sleeping a wink that night.
The annals of prep football history are incomplete — often recounted years later through folk tales and stretches of truth. Generations of proud former athletes retell stories about their varsity days with a sort of blissful nostalgia, reliving nights only they were there to experience. This generation won’t have to do that. With the growth of technology and the increased exposure of high school sports, particularly for elite leagues such as the WCAC, there are digital receipts.
“I take pride in re-watching it all the time,” Marshall said of his catch, which was No. 1 on the top 10 of “SportsCenter” that night. “. . . My friends send it to me all the time out of the blue, just a little remembrance thing. I still think it’s a super cool play. Me and my family re-watch it all the time, the game online.”
Marshall can thank Ken Meringolo. In 2008, Meringolo founded 1st Amendment Sports, and his site is in the third year of a five-year deal with the WCAC to stream games online. Meringolo graduated from Bishop McNamara and had seen many years of those games before he started broadcasting them, but following the events in 2020 is a different experience.
“I’ll always remember them in my mind and in my heart because they’ll live forever, but that’s where they live,” he said. “When we talk about those games from the ’80s and ’90s, more often than not, they’re memories that you talk about. I think the cool thing about that game and these moments in the last couple years is that people are going to be able to go back and see it.”
Meringolo has always believed that “moments like that happen more often than people think” — now they just happen to be posted on the Internet. In a world where kids experience more every year via screens, high school sports are no exception. And those highlights on social media make high school football fanaticism accessible to everyone with a computer or smartphone.
Unlike Marshall’s classic catch, though, the most endearing moments of a high school football season are not often the biggest plays of a championship game. They become lifetime memories for the teens who wake up that morning with no idea that something remarkable — emotional or fun or perhaps bizarre — will happen to them that day.
A trick and a treat
Soon after Patrick Orndoff took over as North Point’s offensive coordinator in the early 2010s, Ken Lane, who had recently stepped down as the program’s head coach, told him about an incredible trick play. It started with the quarterback bouncing the football to a slot receiver, who caught the bounce pass and threw it downfield.
“That’s not real,” Orndoff recalled thinking, incredulous. “You’re lying.”
But Lane was not lying. And when North Point ran the play in practice in 2012 and 2013, it worked. In 2014, senior quarterback Brandon Battle called out Orndoff in a meeting: “Are we actually going to run it this year?”
Later that year, in a playoff game, Orndoff sent in the call: bounce pass. The players in the huddle hid their excitement. They lined up in an unusual formation. The trick worked to perfection. Battle flipped it to backup quarterback Cole Poncheri, who threw downfield to Geordan Clark for a 42-yard touchdown. Their sideline was delirious. The play appeared on the ESPN show “SportsNation.”
Video of the play has received nearly 100,000 views on YouTube (with a couple of comments criticizing a cameraman who, perhaps in the excitement of it all, loses track of the receiver). There’s even a thread on Reddit questioning the legality of the play.
Battle went on to play at William & Mary, but he still calls that 2014 season his most fun year of football. He does not remember who North Point’s opponent was that night, or which team ended his season. He remembers the kind of play that explains many students’ decision to go out for football in the first place — and he can relive it whenever he pleases.
While North Point produced wonder with ingenuity and execution, a couple of years later an unheralded punter in Virginia made his own highlight by saving a botched play with his speed.
Rock Ridge’s Ben Wright wasn’t even supposed to play the night he made the highlight reel. He felt ill at school that day in 2016, so he ended up playing only on special teams, where he found himself as a punter fielding an errant snap.
Wright scooped up the snap, sprinted past a group of would-be tacklers, collided with one, stayed on his feet and continued running for a touchdown. “The ball went over my head, and I kind of blacked out,” Wright said. “Next thing I knew, I was in the end zone. It just blew up.”
He would have another big moment as a senior, drilling a game-winning field goal in quadruple overtime after missing an extra point earlier that night. Rock Ridge won only four games in its first three years as a varsity program, but Wright has two big memories, one that went viral.
Before his family moved to Loudoun County in 2014, Wright spent much of his childhood in Las Vegas. He often invoked that upbringing as a football player: “The first thing I learned was to bet on yourself.” High school athletes do that all the time. To an unsuspecting few, the payout is a memory they will always treasure.