Mooseheart field a blessing for Bulldogs

MOOSEHEART – With no practice football fields at Batavia High School – and, by extension, no lights – the Bulldogs have had a friendly neighbor lend assistance for a number of years.

Thursday night was one of a number of practices of the past several years, even before coach Dennis Piron’s current five-year tenure, where the Bulldogs have made the roughtly three-mile drive to Mooseheart to practice on the school’s artificial turf field.

“We have been very lucky to have such a great neighbor in Mooseheart to use this beautiful field for a number of years,” Piron said. “With no practice field, I’m not sure what we would have done otherwise because we have to get on a good surface at some point to get in a good, quality practice.”

From the moment the Bulldogs step off the buses at Mooseheart to the time they leave, it is usually all business, and while there, that “M” for Mooseheart at midfield is viewed in a different way.

“It’s an ‘M,’ ” Piron said, “but we call it the ‘W’ for ‘win.’ ”

Piron thinks the practices at Mooseheart only boost what is already an energized group of Bulldogs entering today’s Class 7A quarterfinal against Cary-Grove.

“For what we need to accomplish, these practices are usually always high intensity,” Piron said. “They get the lights on here pretty early now, and when we come here, it amps up everything about our program. The longer we are here, the better we get. We’re fortunate that we have this opportunity, so we want to make sure to not let it go to waste any time we’re here.”

Looks easy for a reason: When you see Batavia impose its will on teams and have its way rather easily against what are thought to be strong teams, there’s a reason.

As Piron said, “all the puzzle pieces have fallen into place again,” but it goes beyond that.

“All of these kids making a huge impact for us this year, guys like linebackers [Zack Majka] and [Sean Callahan], I mean these guys were JV players for us last year that we were hoping could assume the role that they all have,” Piron said.

“But for it to look as easy as it looks at our school sometimes, a lot of men have to volunteer a lot of time as coaches and a lot of boys have to sacrifice an awful lot of free time instead of doing other things that they maybe would have done if they weren’t here.”

Piron knows those little things, certainly combined with skill, are the reason his program has reached the level of success it has.

“All the things that these kids do when we go out on a Friday night and make people say, ‘Wow, Batavia is just loaded with talent,’ well, these kids are talented, but they are all also optimizing what God gave them because of how much they have worked and how much they have cared,” Piron said. “If they didn’t want to do this, they wouldn’t show up and compete how they have.”