A Sussex County sports story: “We Roll Tight”
Sports people connect the dots upon every encounter. It's how we make sense of the world, and in Sussex County, that connection is elevated to a religion. Going out on no limb, I'd say that loyalties through sports histories in Sussex Country - don't want to limit this to Cape - prevail over generations. Success for one of us means success for us all.
Last Saturday morning it was a battle of undefeated New Castle County Division Two football teams as vocational-technical schools Hodgson and St. Georges battled on the Hawks' field. Brian Donahue, Cape's principal, and I went to a game that on the surface offered no interest for either one of us.
Hodgson won the game 16-6 as the spread offense with breakaway backs survived the pound-them-into-submission offense of St. Georges' head coach J.D. Maull, a former Cape quarterback, along with three of his uncles, Gilbert, Jay and Lonnie, and his cousin Kai Maull. Definitely something ironic about a team coached by a staff of quarterbacks; Kai is an assistant who doesn't like to throw the football.
But below the waterline is the storyline for the Sussex County fans in the stands. Bill Muehleisen, a former Cape head coach 1971 through 1975, is on the Hodgson staff. So is Franz Kopple, who coached at Delaware State with Bill Collick and Herky Billings, as well as the head coach of the Silver Eagles, Frank Moffit, whom Coach Muehleisen describes as “a Caesar Rodney kid who I also coached at Delaware." Gerald Allen, a hurdler for Cape in the early 1970s for Coach Tom Hickman, is the assistant superintendent at Hodgson. Gerald was at the Cape versus Central game as an uncle to Dom Brisco and was quite astonished at all the flags flying around.
Muehleisen is in his 47th straight year coaching football somewhere and when told there was a rumor going around that he was retiring, the former Marine just laughed, “Are you kidding, with all the kids coming back? Plus, I'm having too much fun.”
The Hawks took their second possession, went to the Power I and just ran between the tackles for 78 yards in 16 plays. Every Hodgson defender including Jack was in the box; it didn't matter. The older crowd along the fence were singing “Chain of Fools “ with every first down. Later in the game they would change their tune to “You got to throw it, that running game ain't working no more.”
While I was perusing the stands, it was hard not to spot Indian River coach Ray Steele, a trimmed-down version, but that green shirt and hat gave him away; he just couldn't pull off the Tower Hill look.
Ronnie Burton from Belltown is on the St. Georges' staff. Coach J.D. Maull's high school teammate Marlon Miller was in the house, so was great-uncle Jay Kennedy or Pop Pop Jay, depends on which Maull clan you are talking about.
The sports lesson learned and understood is that success is best savored by the friends and families back home. Scientists learned that when they discovered the power of the atom.
